Interview with Garvin Boyle, teacher

Learn about students' data analysis projects
Statistics Canada's student analysis data fair, March 8, 2008
Interviewer: Yves Saint-Pierre, Statistics Canada, Montreal
Interviewee: Garvin Boyle, Grade 12 mathematics teacher, Glebe Collegiate Institute, Ottawa (Ontario)

Yves: So, you're one of the teachers who is bringing students today to the Data Fair. Tell me a bit more about how it was to organize this, or why you chose to come into this type of project and so on.

Teacher: Well, for me it was very last minute. So, I'm very happy to say that I've managed to bring four students.

Yves: What would you say is the benefit for your students of getting involved in such a project?

Teacher: For these students, they're all very capable students, and they're looking at some kind of a future in mathematics, so they all have an interest in finding out how people work professionally with mathematics, so they were quite excited to come to the Stats Canada Data Fair with the hopes that they would get to see what other students had done, but also to get to talk to some people who work in mathematics professionally.

Yves: If you were to tell other teachers about this process, what would you tell them?

Teacher: Hmmm … I would say, don't leave it to the last minute like I did, because it's a bit of a scramble getting it organized at the last minute. But, strongly encourage your best students to participate in something like this. School is a very intense and very enclosed environment, and this gives them an opportunity to step outside of that school environment, however briefly, to see what's happening in the working world a bit. So, I think it's a great idea.

Yves: And so the four students that are presenting today. Were they the only ones in the class that did this kind of work, or everyone participated there and tried to do some data analysis, then you selected four of them to come and present?

Teacher: The four who are here today are all volunteers, but I decided to do my project a little bit differently the last semester. What I found the first few times I taught the course: I had my students work on a single large project that they progressed over the period of the semester, and many of the students did not do well. So this time I took quite a radically different approach. I had many labs; many small assignments, culminating in a final project, and I feel my students in general – especially the weaker students – did much better. My goal was to give them the skills to participate in a project team that would produce some kind of statistical report. Now, those who have volunteered to come, not only learned the skills, but they are also very bright students in mathematics. So, they more than exceeded my goals in the project.