Aritz Cardenas

Professor Dennis Parker

MIAA 350
Spring 2014

Reflection #2 (3-20-2014)
Every time I introduce a new region in my 7
th
world history class, I attempt to
engage my students by exposing them to information about the present (rather than about
the past). I decided to use the C.I.A. Factbook website to gather information from six
countries from Latin America: Mexico, Guatemala, Chile, Haiti, Brazil, and Venezuela. From
this assignment, I was able to have students use statistics to make comparisons about the
different countries.
Students first created a chart looking up the statistics comparing life expectancy (in
years), GDP income (in US Dollars), population, percentage of population below poverty
level, literacy percentage, and number of years average citizen attends school.
Once students were able to complete the shot, they needed to answer a number of
questions by utilizing the data. One of the questions that I had students answer asked
students to solve the following math problem: How many people in Mexico are below the
poverty line? Students needed to first identify in their chart what was the population of
Mexico (which was 121,000,000). They also needed to look for the percentage of people
below the poverty (53%). I modeled for students how to solve this problem, by converting
the percentage into a decimal, then multiplying the population to it. Most students decided
to use a proportion as their strategy to solve the problem, as they recently learned about it
in their math classes. Once students came up with the correct answer, they needed to try
do another problem just like that one, though with the nation of Haiti.
Students were initially suspicious and confused as to why I had assigned a math
problem for them in a history class, but I explained to them the rationale of how social
scientists use statistics on a daily basis. I felt like students were very engaged in this
assignment.