By Lauren Musu-Gillette
Join us in celebrating World Statistics Day on October 20, 2015!
While most of NCES’ products are designed for education stakeholders such as teachers, school administrators, and researchers, the Kids' Zone is designed for use by some of our most important consumers - students! The Kids' Zone contains features such as a dice game that helps students learn about probability and statistics, links to online tools where students can find information on their school, and a graph creation tool.
According to the graph above, which element forms the second greatest portion of the earth’s crust?
- Oxygen
- Silicon
- Aluminum
- Iron
- Calcium
The above question is an example of an 8th grade mathematics question that can be answered using the Dare to Compare feature of the NCES Kids' Zone. This feature of the NCES Kids' Zone allows you to choose questions (5, 10, 15, or 20) from different subject areas (Civics, Economics, Geography, History, Mathematics, or Science) asked at different grade levels depending on the subject selected (4th grade, 8th grade, 9th grade, or 12th grade). After you answer the questions, your answers are scored and you can see how you compared to students in that age range either nationally or internationally. For example, on this question 87 percent of U.S. 8th graders selected the correct response of Silicon on a past NAEP assessment.
Create a Graph can be used by teachers and students. In fact, Create a Graph is one of the most frequently visited pages on the NCES website. Using this tool, you can create bar graphs, line graphs, pie graphs, area graphs, or you can choose an XY plot in order to plot individual points. For example, everyone in class could answer a series of questions using Dare to Compare. Then, the class could calculate what percentage of the class responded correctly to certain items and graph that percentage along with the percentage of students who answered the question correctly in different regions of the U.S., or different countries. We encourage you to join us in celebrating World Statistics Day on October 20, 2015 by planning a fun activity, such as the one suggest above, using the NCES Kids' Zone. Follow us on Twitter @EdNCES for other ideas and announcements about World Statistics Day.
There are a lot of fun features on the NCES Kids' Zone – so go ahead and explore!