Minutes of meeting 02.08.2001 at Lincoln school

 

Present: Joanna, Marilyn, Yongjoo, Alex, Marlynne, Tom

 

We discussed the sequencing of the Distributions post-VA activities. We had been operating on the assumption that we’d first explore the notion of normalization as a precursor to working on quantitative metrics, but Marilyn and Joanna were skeptical that the kids would make much sense of this. This is the meeting where we made the critical decision to flip the order on its head by first developing comparison techniques using distributions of the same size, and then extending that to populations of different sizes.

 

Here is where we introduced the “broccoli preference” idea, and were considering first doing an actual survey of two classes of the same size, then two classes of different sizes. However, as we spoke, we realized that the notion of a quantitative metric required us to have at least three or more classes of the same size (so we could talk about how distribution A was “closer” to distribution B than to distribution C).