Mathematical Connections from Biology: Killer Bees Come to Life in the Classroom

The middle school mathematics curriculum emphasizes integrated curriculum projects in response to the need to give students opportunities to explore and broaden areas of investigations. These interdisciplinary experiences help students understand the challenges faced by professionals. Although many educators concur that data analysis and statistics taught in the mathematics classroom should use data from real-world situations (NCTM 1989), mathematics teachers often need additional resources, both human and material, and must search beyond their textbooks for exciting activities. One way to breathe more life into mathematics teaching is to bring in ideas from other fields of study, particularly career opportunities that involve collecting and analyzing data. We describe a field-tested interdisciplinary-unit activity that involves collecting data about honeybees. In this activity, middle school students gain hands-on experiences with collecting, transforming, and analyzing data by using actual techniques employed by entomologists, the scientists who study insects. Ultimately, students acquire a sense of the methodology that scientists use to obtain a quantitative “view” of the world, one in which they conceptualize objects as things that can be measured (Thompson 1995).