Record Breaking

What mathematical problem solving could students participate in when engaged in the Guided Inquiry, Record Breaking: Are athletes getting better over time? The open-ended nature of this question lends itself to students devising multiple solution pathways as students consider the authenticity of the context. The ambiguity of the word ‘athletes’ means an answer depends upon whether students focus on women, men or children. Does getting ‘better’ mean faster, jumping higher/further, lifting more? Described in detail in the Record Breaking inquiry unit (Thinking Through Mathematics, Book 3, unit 8), adaptations for conducting the inquiry in different year levels – and alignment with the Australian Curriculum in each of these year levels – can be found below on this  Research Page  of the IMPACT website.

An article exploring this inquiry has recently been published in the Australian Primary Mathematics Classroom journal (Muir & Wells, 2019) and includes further illustrations of the mathematics in action in an Australian Year 5/6 classroom. These illustrations include different data displays typical of the work produced by students and exchanges made by students that include conclusions made in the Defend phase. 

​From the article:
Student's refined question: Are athletes getting better at jumping?

John: As you can see from my graph – and I did gold medals in men’s long jump – in 1968, George Beaman jumped 8.9 metres and that was the world record at the time and the reason for that was that it was in Mexico City and it has a high altitude and the oxygen’s thinner so you can jump further so from there it’s obviously gone down a lot [points to graph]. In 1972, it started to increase again [points to graph] and from then on it went a little bit up and down … in conclusion out of our four events, three are getting better at jumping (women and men’s pole vault, women’s triple jump) but not in the men’s long jump because it has to do with the places where the Olympics are being held. (Muir & Wells, 2019) 

​The Guided Inquiry approach provided students in Year 5/6 the opportunity to engage in authentic mathematical problem solving that required understanding of data representations, and fluency with interpretation, beyond simplistic representations. The reasoning by students (see the above example) required explanation of their analysis and evaluation of authentic data (about athletes) to justify conclusions reached in the Defend phase. 

​From Muir, T. & Wells, J. (2019). Are athletes getting better over time? Australian Primary Mathematics Classroom, 24(3), 15-20.