The business world offers many opportunities for statisticians, especially in advising decision-making processes. Elementary school age youngsters in their everyday lives also are confronted with decision situations, some with a business flavor, where a rudimentary understanding of statistics may prove useful. However, the pedagogical concerns of making the study of these situations accessible at an early age often prohibits consideration until the problems can be discussed on a high mathematical level. Consider, for example, the classic "Newsboy's Problem" concerning a newspaper seller attempting to maximize profit. Children can appreciate such a problem; indeed they may have paper routes or operate newspaper stands themselves. SHUNDA'S NEWSSTAND provides an excellent example of how an operations research problem involving statistics in a decision-making context can be presented at the elementary school level. A second example described involves Population Growth.
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