Building Critical Thinking Skills with Graphs

One of the Quantitative Reasoning Outcomes for Integrated Quantitative Learning courses  is that students should be able to analyze, summarize, and interpret quantitative data and effectively communicate the findings.

One way to achieve that outcome is to have students practice interpreting data. Possible assignments include:

• Giving students a good graph or a poor graph and ask them to tell its good points and bad points

• Giving students a graph and ask them to tell one thing you can tell from the graph and/or one thing they can’t tell. (This would be good for a VoiceThread because many students can comment on one graph.)

• Giving students a graph and ask them to measure it against a checklist/rubric that you and they have created.

You can use one of the following technologies to have students do the assignment orally.

• Jing – a free screen capture program
• VoiceThreads – a free group discussion program

There are many excellent resources for things like choosing which type of graph to use at the National Center for Educational Statistics website:  http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/pdf/graph_tutorial.pdf

This website provides what you need to decide which technology best fits your need, see what your role would be as an instructor in the process and what are some resources for both instructors and students.

Tags: critical thinking, Graphs, IQL, quantitative learning

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 at 1:54 pm and is filed under Jing, VoiceThreads. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.