(Dis)trusting statistics: a one-page guide

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A numbers expert declares he’ll sum up everything he knows about analyzing statistics on the back of a postcard. Could any TOK teacher NOT instantly spring to the alert? He’s inspired me to attempt my own lean summary: a single page mini-guide on (dis)trusting statistics, useful in our own educational context of Theory of Knowledge. […]

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Thank you, Hans Rosling: numbers, facts, and the world

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Hans Rosling, who passed away earlier this month, made numbers tell significant stories about the world.  A self-proclaimed “edutainer” — educator and entertainer — Professor Rosling championed a worldview based on facts. He had a genius for revealing large patterns in human development by making people see the data on population, inequality, and global education and health. He […]

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Square Removal

A select few of us gathered for a double session at the latest Mathematical Association conference. Attention was drawn to two actions involving squares. Action 1 Start with two or more squares drawn side by side in a line (on the left below).     Now use the long edge to form a square adjacent […]

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Short Summary Sheets

One of my Y13 students intends to resit Statistics 1 and Core 2 in summer this year, alongside Core 3, Core 4, and Mechanics 1.  I devised a 5 week plan to cover the entire course in an hour per week.  This centred on 5 one-page summary sheets for five broad areas.  For some reason […]

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Reliability in psychological science: methodology in crisis?

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“Scientific truth is a moving target,” wrote the editors of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) a decade ago. “But is it inevitable, as John Ioannidis argues …that the majority of findings are actually false?” In the decade since the editors posed this question, the psychological sciences have been shaken by further challenges to their credibility, including some widely reported controversies. It was August of this […]

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Mathematics and Scientific Methodology: example Malaria

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(Originally posted on Activating TOK)  The statistics are horrifying.  Every minute, a child dies from malaria. In 2013, 90% of the world’s malaria deaths occurred in Africa and over 430,000 African children died before their fifth birthdays. And there are plenty more statistics  where these came from : In 2013, there were about 198 million malaria cases (with an uncertainty […]

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