School Supoort Services Maori Advisory Pages

1. BOPMA 2018 - Measuring and Monitoring Overtime - The workshop I ran 23/11/18 at the BOPMA Conference was about getting reliable information about a cohort, a class and a student. In the work I do this is very important to establish and usually there is no reliable existing system in a school that I can use. There are plenty of notes and teh LOMAS resources are elsewhere on my website. Download PPT HERE

2. Sample Size - How big should a sample be? - This ppt was the result of work with some teachers in the Eastern Bay of Plenty. I had noticed in schools that the usual response to "How many should I sample" was "30". Teachers simply told students to take samples of 30. Why? This ppt shows how to have students investigate and make that statement and it also generates a model and explanation of the 1/√n in the confidence interval formulae. I used iNZight but any sampling package would do. Download. Download Samplsize .ppt

3. How to Solve a Problem V3 - My inquiry from 2011 became a major resource and underwent several revisions and updates. NCEA math assessments are all about problem solving so the first competency students need to have is "How to solve a problem". Based on Polya ideas it is 1. Read and understand the problem, 2. Draw a picture of the problem recording all you know, 3. Decide on a strategy using a line through the drawing 4. Do the calculations using the headings from the drawing 5. Answer the Question or problem and make all the comments you wish. This will provide Merit and probably Excellence grades. EXAMPLE drawing using the Huia and Mike Travel Plan Assessment. Download HTSAP .ppt

4. Doing Numbers or Doing Mathematics? - I see a lot of telling. Teachers telling students what to do or how to solve a problem. Teachers showing a method or an algorithm to make a task easier to find the answer. Learning takes time and learners should struggle and be asked how and why. Without the underlying meaning mathematics is just numbers. The product of two consecutive odd numbers is always 1 less than a perfect square, eg, 5 and 7 multiplies to 35, add1 to get 36 or 6x6. This seems to always work so prove it! Why does this seem to work. When you have proved it you can say "It always works!" Download .ppt

5. Farmer Brown Problem - I was driving to math meeting and the local radio had a math problem as a quiz question. "When Farmer Brown drove to town at 20km/hr he arrived an hour late. When he drove to town at 30km/hr he arrived an hour early. How fast should he drive to arrive on time?" A lady rang in excited and could hardly wait to blurt out her answer "25" she said, "It is a 25 km/hr, half way." The announcer had a different answer and sent her packing. I drove on thinking of a few ways to solve the problem. Download the .ppt

6. Sam paints a house problem - Not a ppt. The problem is Sam paints a house in 3 days and Bob can paint a house in 5 days. If they work together how long will it take to paint a house. If uyou Google Math Movies you can find the movie of teh poriginal problem.

7. Bootstrapping Science EXPT data - Here is an example of how using Bootstrapping to analyze data from a common pendulum physics experiment to measure the value of gravity the accuracy of the result is improved by a factor of 10. The traditional ways this experiment is analyzed gives values of about 9.8m/s/s but this way changes that to 9.83m/s/s using the same data. It seems odd that this is not a normalized practice by now in NZ Physics Y13 classes when many of those students are studying Statistics where this procedure is learned. Data from a science experiment is just a sample of 10 or so data points from many many thousands that could possibly have been taken of a population of data for that experiment. This could be applied to any science experiment of course.