Making Decisions with Data

Abstract Information is transforming the way people live and the way they do business. Making decisions based on this information is an increasingly critical skill. The data analysis strand in Principles and Standards for School Mathematics describes the important ideas that are central to understanding how to process information and to use it wisely. School work in data analysis and statistics has primarily centered on making plots, organizing data, reading graphs, and calculating statistics. At the secondary level students should apply this knowledge and the skills they have developed, putting them into a context where they learn to make good decisions based on well-designed experiments with probability and randomness as tools in making these decisions. NCTM has produced Navigating Through Data Analysis: Grades 9-12 to help teachers make this approach a reality. This paper briefly describes the book and discusses in detail one chapter’s activities, where students formulate questions for data from a given context, choose appropriate graphs to analyze the data, and use simulation and informal inference procedures to find answers and make decisions