Hi all,
My son does pretty well with math concepts (still working on multiplication tables though). He came home this week with stem and leaf plots. His teacher explained to me that the tens place goes on the left side of the line, and the ones place goes on the other - grouped by the tens number. So I understand that.
She had to get the kids, and I didn’t have time to ask her what the purpose of a stem and leaf plot is. They ARE on our Virginia SOLs this year.
Can anyone give me an answer? (My son doesn’t know.)
Thanks,
Lil
Re: Stem and leaf plots?
Thanks, Victoria
I get it now. I’m certianly not shy about writing to the VDOE! :-)
Lil
In real life, the purpose is to note down and organize data quickly. Imagine yourelf doing a research study, say on reading speed, and you have a class of thirty kids and you want to note how many seconds it takes them to read a given page of work. With a dash of practice, thje stem and leaf would save a fair amount of writing and let you get the data recorded as each kid put the paper down; and then you’d have nicely grouped data to get averages and spreads and so on.
In school, the purpose is to do a whole bunch of busywork that looks impressive and complex and bamboozles parents while having no real mathematical depth or difficulty.
This topic is on the SOL’s because it’s in some of the large commercially sold texts, and it’s in the texts because it’s on some of the multiple-choice tests, and it’s on the tests because it’s an easy extra topic to throw in, statistics is a hot topic right now, and it’s an easy one to test by multiple choice.
Unless your kid spends some years as a graduate research assistant he’ll never do this outside the classroom. Write to your state department of education about making the SOL’s sensible — if enough people complain they will move, albeit slowly — and tell your kid to do enough to get through the tests and then not worry about these side topics; concentrate on the central skills.