Lions, Tigers, and Bears: Is It Our Fault They're Disappearing? (Oh My!)

As an educator, I need to be able to present my students with the reading comprehension strategies they need to become proficient readers. Although my discipline is mathematics, it is still crucial that I promote literacy in my classroom. There are statistics courses offered in Maryland public high schools, but statistics concepts are introduced in almost every basic mathematics class. A common concept covered in a statistics unit is “bad” statistics. This includes improperly collected or interpreted data. This week, my partner, Heather, and I chose an article that debunked a tweet claiming “humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970.”

The Atlantic’s expository article “Wait, Have We Really Wiped Out 60 Percent of Animals?” introduces the claim that humanity has destroyed 60 percent of the world’s animal population since 1970. The organization that made this claim cited the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF’s) Living Planet report. However, this report only stated that the size of vertebrae populations has declined by 60 percent on average, which is very different from the claim that the whole animal population has declined by 60 percent. People are reading this tweet and believing it, which is problematic because the organization is making claims about metrics that were not assessed. There are countless issues with humanity killing off animals and wildlife, but author Ed Yong states that “when the reality is this sensational, there’s (no) need to sensationalize it further” with incorrect data analysis (Yong, 2018). It is crucial for reporters to characterize the problem and its scope correctly.

This article introduces important statistics concepts like populations and samples. The populations used in the WWF study were mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians. These populations were mostly sampled through direct counts, camera traps, satellites, and proxies. However, none of these samples can be considered representative of the whole animal population because they were mostly taken in Europe. The animal population in Europe is not going to be representative of the animal population in Africa.

Students should have some background knowledge of concepts discussed in the article before reading the text. Some of this knowledge includes an understanding of WWF, their goals, and the purpose of the Living Planet report. I could give my students a quick overview of WWF’s Living Planet report before assigning the reading. I also need to make sure my students understand some of the vocabulary. This article uses some complicated terms, such as “pedantic,” “ether,” and “dichotomy.” I do not expect students to understand what most of these words mean, so we will define them before tackling the text. Students should also be aware of some of the references the author makes, including coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef and deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. The author also references conspiracy theories and “fake news” in the government. This article is still recent, but it probably will not work as well as a reading assignment a few years from now.

Overall, this article is organized well. I believe it would work well as a reading assignment in a high school statistics class or other math class with a statistics unit. I really like that this article uses a textbook-type example with lions, tigers, and bears (oh my!). Students can easily see the connection between real-world examples and problems they would encounter in a math class. The following is Yong's example:

Imagine you have three populations: 5,000 lions, 500 tigers, and 50 bears. Four decades later, you have just 4,500 lions, 100 tigers, and five bears. Those three populations have declined by 10 percent, 80 percent, and 90 percent, respectively – which means an average decline of 60 percent. But the total number of actual animals has gone down from 5,550 to 4,605, which is a decline of just 17 percent.

I was looking through some reading strategies I could implement with my students, and really liked Maureen McLaughlin’s “save the last word for me.” In this activity, students “select a quote, fact, or idea from the text” (McLaughlin, 2015). Then, students get into groups and “explain why they chose the information and which connections they can make to it” (McLaughlin, 2015). The quote that stood out to me most in this article was "surely what matters is waking people up, and if an inexactly communicated statistic can do that, isn’t that okay?” (Yong, 2018). If I was doing a “save the last word for me” activity, I would pose this question to my group members and ask them to share their opinions. However, Heather and I were discussing this strategy and decided that a think-pair-share would probably work better. This article is a little controversial, so we agreed that a class discussion would be beneficial. Letting students discuss quotes and ideas they found interesting or important with their partners first will help facilitate a productive class discussion.

References 

McLaughlin, M. (2015). Content Area Reading: Teaching and Learning for College and Career Readiness. Pearson Education.

Yong, E. (2018, October 31). “Wait, Have We Really Wiped Out 60 Percent of Animals?” The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/10/have-we-really-killed-60-percent-animals-1970/574549/