As statistics continues to increase its presence in the school curriculum, particularly the mathematics one, it becomes increasingly more difficult for teachers to be able to fit everything in. They complain that if statistics must be included, then something must go. One suggestion to solve their problem is to combine the topics of statistics and mathematics so that both are presented together. The NSF-funded project Data-Driven Mathematics has done precisely that. The series of eleven modules motivates mathematics topics found in pre-algebra, algebra, geometry, advanced algebra, and advanced mathematics from a data point of view that involves students. This paper presents some insight as to how this may be done with the advanced mathematics topic of matrices. (See Burrill, Burrill, Landwehr, & Witmer, 1998).
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education