Use statistical analysis to explore gender discrimination in the workplace, schools, STEM fields, sports, and other topics of interest to students.
Use statistical analysis to explore discriminatory housing practices such as redlining throughout history.
Explore the statistics behind racial profiling.
Use statistical analysis to understand discriminatory school acceptance rates - how are college/private/charter schools accepting students? Is there evidence for discrimination in the numbers?
Highlighted Activities:
Students will have a variety of research projects to complete over the course of the unit, exploring themes of discrimination in multiple ways.
Gender Discrimination Analysis Report - students will be asked to research the math of gender discrimination. What do the stats look like? They will have to download a dataset from the General Social Survey (GSS), perform detailed statistical analysis - including regression analysis, and produce a report detailing what the numbers revealed in terms of potential gender discrimination.
Housing Discrimination Research Study Design - students will be asked to read parts of Measuring Housing Discrimination in a National Study by Report of a Workshop (2002). If they had to design a study to measure housing discrimination what would it look like?
Racial Profiling Probability Simulations - Teach students how to perform probability simulations. After they have learned this, you can work with data on traffic stops (you can contact your local ACLU to get this data). They will be asked to simulate the number of people in each racial category that should have been pulled over based on probability simulations and to compare that to the real numbers.
Education Discrimination in Numbers - Students will be asked to conduct a research project at acceptance rates at a school of their choice (college, private, charter, etc.). How comparable are these acceptance rates to the population? Graph their change over time. Are students seeing any mathematical trends? How equitable do they feel acceptance rates are given this information?
Probability and Statistics Standards:
2.0 Students know the definition of conditional probability and use it to solve for probabilities in finite samples spaces
12.0 Students find the line of best fit to a given distribution of data by using least squares regression
15.0 Students are familiar with the notions of a statistic of a distribution of values, of the sampling distribution of a statistic, and the variability of a statistic
18.0 Students determine the p-value for a statistic for a simple random sample from a normal distribution
19.0 Students are familiar with the chi-square distribution and chi-square test and understand their uses