Welcome to IMSI!

Thanks for visiting IMSI!

IMSI stands for Interactive Middle Statistics Investigations, and we’re here to help increase the effectiveness of your Middle School data analysis, statistics, and probability lessons. 

We’ll start with lessons designed in the most popular open-source curriculum available (Open Up Resources, which in turn serves as the basis for Illustrative Mathematics, which in turn serves as the basis for the Desmos curriculum, among others). We are going to tie those lessons into a playful, investigation-style activity that you can simply plug-and-play into your current scope and sequence. We’re going to base these investigations in an interactive platform (CODAP*) that’s easy for Middle Schoolers (and their teachers) to master.

We will go into why we think these are important improvements to already great lessons in our next blog post , but first a little bit about our name, and the people behind IMSI.

“Interactive”:  We want students interacting with data.  We want less student time spent on the set-up (“Create a dot plot!”) and more time investigating the relationships found in the data (“What happens to the dot plot when…”)

“Middle”: We’ll be providing investigations for Middle Schoolers:  6th grade, 7th grade, 8th grade, and Algebra 1.  If you’re looking for High School resources, we do have an Other Resources section, which includes investigations not specifically aligned to certain curricula, standards, or grade levels, and we ’d happily point you to our friends at Skew the Script or The Stats Medic for more complete High School/AP Stats resources.

“Interactive Middle”: A nod to Robert Kaplinsky’s incredible Open Middle resources; the “middle” of our statistics investigations are “open” in the same sense, but with a statistical, investigative, interactive twist.

“Statistics”:  We are focusing specifically on standards and lessons from OUR and IM that include statistics, data, or probability standards.

“Investigations”:  We are purposefully steering away from calling our resources “lessons” or “activities.”  We want to emphasize (and, in turn, we want teachers to emphasize to their students) that data analysis works best when you bring a sense of curiosity and mystery to your approach*. 

That’s IMSI.

Now…who is IMSI?  

Shauna Hedgepeth (“Hedge”) and Joel Bezaire (“Joel”) are both veteran middle school teachers committed to bringing the IMSI principles to Middle School classrooms everywhere.  Joel and Hedge have been pals on Twitter since somehow-not-meeting-in-person at the NCTM 2015 Fall regional conference in Joel’s hometown of Nashville.  We first met in person at Twitter Math Camp in Minneapolis in the summer of 2016, and have been formally co-presenting and collaborating since 2017’s Twitter Math Camp in Atlanta.  See our full bios, presentation history, and teacher testimonials on our About page.  We would love to come to your school, district, or math conference to share more about the IMSI model and help you and your colleagues up your statistical game with middle schoolers.  Contact us! 

*A note about CODAP:  We’ve found the best technology tool for most of these investigations is CODAP (Common Online Data Analysis Platform) by the Concord Consortium.  It’s free, robust, and device-agnostic since it’s online.  There are other great tools for statistics (Desmos! GeoGebra!) but find that a lot of the implementation intricacies of those platforms are better suited for high school or college statistics students.  CODAP has an ease-of-use that really serves Middle Schoolers well.  Old-school stats teachers might recognize a lot of CODAP’s features from Fathom or Tinkerplots, as CODAP is the online legacy version of those old programs.