Data Collection and Elementary School Mathematics

The curriculum standards of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics advocate the inclusion of data collection activities throughout the middle school. This paper presents activities that implement these recommendations. Activities include data collection in the home, school and community and encourage students to summarize, interpret, and draw inferences from the data they collect individually and in cooperative groups. Four types of data collection activities are presented ‐ observations, surveys, experiments and sampling. Every activity requires minimal planning/preparation by the teacher yet involves students in a variety of roles. Further, each activity can be adapted to different classroom settings.