The exercise that Khan Academy presents here is as far as middle school math goes, standards-wise. It’s the drawing them by hand from tiny isolated fake data sets that doesn’t make sense to me. I’ve updated the exercise so that it now includes anywhere from 8 to 15 points, so students are forced to deal with two middle numbers, both in finding the median and in finding the quartiles.īox and whisker plots are useful and appear all over scientific literature. Seven straight times, without any change in structure or difficulty, even though the underlying task has a huge variation in structure and difficulty. Others have danced around it, but the fundamental flaw (as in some, but not all, Khan exercises) is that you get Random number generators are great for creating a large set of problems that are all basically the same, but in my experience you can provide better assessments/examples with a much smaller set of questions that are designed to illustrate the concept. I think the largest error is the reliance on random numbers to provide a set of assessments that test an actual set of knowledge. Always 15 data points? Never have to deal with “having two medians”? Ever? The data is between 0 and 15 (never -40 to -30, never 100 to 1000, never 0.80 to 1.15)? No outliers? Always starting with the data and making a box-and-whisker, never using the box-and-whisker to make conclusions? It’s kind of fun the first time.Īgree with Brian. This code will always generate 15 data points, and these points will not have any outliers (outside 1.5 * (Q3 - Q1)), so students can just pattern match and drag the lines to the 1st, 4th, 8th, 12th, and 15th places once they’ve sorted the data. Previously: What We Can Learn About Learning From Khan Academy’s Source Code. If you’ve taught box-and-whisker plots, you can sort out the issue here.
What pedagogical mistake has Khan Academy made in the highlighted lines? How would you fix it?ĭon’t get put off by the code. For example, here’s some Javascript from Khan Academy’s box-and-whisker plot exercises. It’s interesting, now, to see pedagogical decisions manifest themselves in web design and code also.
I’m used to seeing pedagogy manifest itself in lesson plans and classroom observations and curriculum and videos.
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