Education Professor Jo Boaler and Stanford Women’s Basketball team up for new sports data unit

For anyone serious about becoming a top athlete, well-known steps to success include intense conditioning, a health-conscious diet, and grueling hours of practice. 

However, a unit developed by Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) Professor Jo Boaler highlights a variable often overlooked in the formula for athletic achievement: the ability to use data to identify pain points in performance and adjust accordingly.

For the new Basketball Data Analytics unit — published on youcubed, a GSE research center  aimed at improving math education by creating math activities, courses and teaching resources — Boaler teamed up with Stanford’s Women’s Basketball team to connect love for the game with the statistics that help players improve.

“The impetus for developing this was the realization that students really need experience with data,” said Boaler, the Nomellini & Olivier Professor of Education at the GSE. “Making sense of data visuals and being able to analyze data ties in very nicely with a lot of mathematics in their school curriculum, yet for most students their experience with data is very uninspiring.”

From calculating percentages for shots taken versus shots made, to evaluating players’ heights and comparing them through the use of mean, median, and mode — Boaler says lessons included in the unit help students connect math concepts to real-world applications in new and engaging ways.

“I think it’s exciting because it’s an interactive lesson plan that exposes students to learning data science in a way that incorporates math with sports, which means getting up out of your seat,” said Mahi Jariwala, a Stanford freshman in Boaler’s “How to Learn Math” course, who helped work on the unit.

“As someone who loves math and played high school basketball, I know I would have loved to have something like this when I was younger,” Jariwala said.

A team effort

The lessons, created for students in grades 4 through 10, allow learners to explore and make decisions with data through basketball, the end result being the formation of a dream team based on stats they’ve collected throughout the unit.

“It was cool to see the different data points each group chose to look at, whether it was height, rebounds, or 3-point shots, in determining which players they would build into their team,” said Shelby Craig, a math teacher at Fallon Middle School in Dublin, Calif., who piloted the course before its official release. “They got passionate about defending their teams and using mathematical language to explain why their team was better.”

To make it accessible for students and teachers less familiar with basketball, the unit kicks off with an introduction to the game that includes what the names of positions are, how points are scored, different moves that can be made, and the general rules of the game. 

A big part of the lesson plans were videos recorded by the Stanford Women’s Basketball team featuring players Mary Ashley Stevenson and Nunu Agara.

“I’ll be the first to say that I’d never had a particularly great relationship with math,” said Stevenson, a forward on the team who transferred to Stanford from Purdue University for her sophomore year. 

Her main role was explaining the key facets of the game, first to the youcubed team and then to students and teachers using the unit, through the videos attached to courses.

“Despite not identifying as a math kid from a young age, I was inspired by the idea that the game I love can be used to teach it,” Stevenson said. “If I was a sixth grader and someone gave me this unit to work on, I would’ve thought this was the best thing in the world.”

Training for a data-filled future

Beyond the classroom, Boaler says she hopes the unit will broaden the scope of what students can do with math later in life. 

“We want them to get from this unit that you don’t have to be an athlete to be involved in basketball,” Boaler said. “There are lots of people who are doing sports analytics for the coaches, for the competition, for the players themselves to learn — it plays a really important role.”

Last fall, at a pre-season game at Stanford versus the University of California, Davis, children were invited to be sports data analysts for the day by filling out data cards with graphics to record the number of 2-pointers, 3-pointers, rebounds, blocks, and assists that happened during the game. 

“It was a cool opportunity for students to come out to the basketball game and be the data keepers and statisticians by taking notes on what was going on,” said Jariwala, who, along with her classmates, distributed the data cards to children at the game.

“I mostly watched the players and recorded on my card, but I learned that they make and miss a lot of shots,” said Ruthie, 10, who attended the game with her mother and grandmother as part of a family tradition. 

Boaler hopes to incorporate the data cards and other tools at future Stanford games.

“Having that collaboration with the team was really great, and my favorite part is seeing the activities in classrooms, and how much the teachers and students enjoy the unit,” Boaler said.

  Watch a video below of a sixth grade class using the unit.