Education Technology


Middle Grades Math: One Year Makes a Difference

by Texas Instruments

Objectives

  • Students will construct and interpret box plots and histograms of data to draw informal comparisons about two populations.
  • Students will compare using medians, quartiles, maximums, minimums, ranges, interquartile ranges, and shapes and clustering patterns found in distributions.

Vocabulary

  • box plot
  • histogram
  • median
  • mean
  • lower and upper Quartiles
  • Interquartile Range (IQR)
  • outlier
  • bin width

About the Lesson

This lesson involves drawing informal comparative inferences about two populations.
As a result, students will:

  • Construct the box plots and histograms to informally compare two samples of data.
  • Compare the bench press strengths of seventh and eighth grade males, the heights of seventh and eighth grade females, and the shuttle times of seventh and eighth grade males with a focus on medians, quartiles, minimums, maximums and the shapes of distributions.
  • Compute, by hand, the five number summaries without technology and then confirm using technology.