The purpose of Statistics

The purpose of statistics give a “gut feel” for what’s happening in a complex system which is intractable to analytic mathematics. The subject is by its very nature imprecise. Children who have been brought up on arithmetic often don’t have this concept. They cannot interpret meaning from the numbers. For so many of them, numbers don’t have meanings. Numbers are numbers and that’s all they are. They are either right or they are wrong. They are not there to be interpreted. They do not exist to provide information. For these children maths is an ivory tower divorced from real life, something you do at school, because that’s what you do at school. This puts them at a great disadvantage when confronted by statistics. Their previous maths ways of thinking do not help them. Many do not attempt to understand what the statistics are trying to explain, and take refuge in the number crunching that statistics involves. They can understand that, they can do that, they can get the right answers for that. In doing so they miss the point of what statistics are for. The fault for this situation lies with the way that maths is taught and the exercises that are given to pupils to practice mathematical operations. Most often they are simply numerical exercises not related to any particular problem, so pupils lose sight that the maths might be for something. Maths is treated by them as being for its own sake, so the calculation of a mean, a mode or a median is the end in itself and the interpretation of these numbers is left unconsidered. Is it any wonder that children find the whole thing confusing and sterile? At Puppet Maths we put our maths into context. We teach maths in the frame of scenarios where there are problems to be solved. The puppets act out these scenarios and make the maths tangible and real for children.