How Many 4th Grade Students Will Take a Trip For Thanksgiving?

An application of the scientific method to a math problem 

Having students apply systematic logic in their thinking is a skill taught and often practiced in class. In this exercise, we were able to kill a whole flock of birds with one stone, as the students applied the scientific method and their knowledge of the levels of prediction to a math problem and a holiday. The student have been learning the different ways of making a prediction this last month. In the parlance of the class, a guess is just " something that springs out of your head." A estimate is based on what a person can observe in their environment while a prediction is based on some knowledge, and details, beyond what is readily observable about the topic. A hypothesis is a well thought out prediction on the outcome of a situation based on logic and an understanding of the situation. Clarity of thinking, and the logic leaps, must be well defined and stated. To start out, the class went though these various steps before making their hypotheses.

In this case, the G was their out of the head number of students who will be taking a trip on Thanksgiving. The E represented their estimate based on looking around the classroom and seeing that three students were absent from the class on the Monday of Thanksgiving week. Their predictions, P, came about from several pieces of information. The first was a show of hands of people who would be leaving from our class by the week's end and on a discussion about who celebrates Thanksgiving, and who doesn't, according to culture and location. The final hypothesis, H, of the numbers of students who would be gone from all five ASIJ classes was based on all the information that came before as well as their own personal logic. Also, a trip was defined as being outside the Tokyo Metropolitan area. Then, following the scientific method, the students went through and wrote down the materials needed to do the write up and listed the procedures by which the data would be collected. Some examples of the rational were: 

• I believe that 64 will be gone because they probably want to go have Thanksgiving with their family at a different place- Alex. 

• I believe that 55 people in the 4th grade are going on a trip because 10x5= 50 and there will be a few more so I think 55- Brad.

Then, as runners were sent down to ask the other fourth grade teachers to take a survey in their class, our class did a modified stem and leaf plot on the various numbers of trip takers the individual students thought might leave. The children also did the mean, median and mode. The calculations were based on 23 children in a class and five teachers. The various numbers of students and teachers taking a trip was charted using a bar graph and the data analysis began. It was very interesting to see what rational the students gave for the results There were actually 39 people who were taking a trip out of a 120 people or a third of the population. However, slightly over half came from two classes- 4F and 4R. Why was this? Here is how two students tackled it.

• In Mrs. Fincher's class and Mr. Richard's, nearly half the class was gone. In the. The other classes, there were differences. Mr. Harrits' had 1/6 of the class gone, and in Mrs. Clarke's class there was 1/5 of the class gone and in Ms. Studwell's class there was 1/3 of the class gone. I think this is why Mrs. Fincher's class and Mr. Richard's class has so many people gone for Thanksgiving. WE might have a lot of people from America and they always celebrate Thanksgiving. I think in other classes, a lot of people have grandparents coming or they may follow Japanese culture. - Maya

• There were 39 people who left. That is about 1/3 of the whole grade. My hypothesis was 57 people so I was 18 off so I was ma-ma close. Why are there so many gone from out two classes and not the others. Because our classes have a lot of people who have families in American. What is it about the people in these two classes that caused this? Maybe the people in these classes are in equal levels of people who don't celebrate Thanksgiving and people that have families in America.- Lizzie

As a matter of fact, demographically the students are pretty much the school    ratio, where half the students hold an American passport, a fourth hold Japanese and the remaining fourth are other nationalities. In all our discussion, the children never triggered on money as being an issue in flying out or the fact that their fathers would be working and couldn't get away on that weekend. Regardless, it was the process of bringing their thinking to the fore which was important in this exercise and one that they did well.

Last updated June 24, 2003
Maintained, and written by, Bridgette Fincher