Puerto Rican Survey on Attitudes about Men and Women in Math

Students from Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico Escuela de la Comunidad Segunda Unidad Sumidero Teacher Aileen Velázquez Students Ages 11-13

In this project students designed and analyed the results of a community and school survey in which the math club students interviewed 222 children and adults about whether men or women are better at math. They report that one of the first lessons they learned was the value of percentages. The students wre initially surprised to see how many respondents thought women were better at math than men. Because they had interviewed more women than men, the raw data did not reveal nearly as much as their later analysis using percentages.

The "Connecting Math to Our Lives" Project began in Puerto Rico where Orillas co-director Enid Figueroa wrote a grant to introduce math teachers in Puerto Rico to global networking and to explore with them how to develop students' math concepts through the writing process. Ailleen Velazquez, the math teacher at an elementary school in the town of Aguas Buenas, participated enthusiastically from the start, forming sister class partnerships with schools in Mexico and Galicia, Spain. The students in the three partner classes exchanged math collages through the mail as part of their introductory cultural packages. In class the Puerto Rican students learned about the writing process, kept math journals, and used e-mail to share math autobiographies, math stories, and math essays analyzing graphs and statistics they found in the local newspaper with their partners.

¿Quién sabe más matemáticas?

(Total de entrevistados: 222)

Entrevistados de 7-18 años

Entrevistados de 19-30 años

For many of the students the project was a highlight of their 6th grade year and so Ms. Velazquez created a "math club" to meet on Saturdays so that her students, now in junior high school, could continue the projects. During the 1997- 1998 school year she and her students chose to work on the math project activity "Promoting Equity at Our School Site".
 

Entrevistados de 31-42 años

Entrevistados de 43-60 años

Students designed and analyzed the rezults of a community and school survey in which the math club students interviewed 222 children and adults about whether men or women are better at math. They report that one of the first lesson they learned was the value of percentages. The students were initially surprised to see how many respondents thought women were better at math than men. Because they had interviewed more women than men the raw data did not reveal nearly as much as their later analyses using percentages. 

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