Activity Overview
This lesson involves representing distributions of data using box plots. The emphasis is on helping students understand the relationship between individual data values and the five-number summary. Students will move data within a dot plot and observe the changes within the corresponding box plot and identify particular actions that most directly affect the five-number summary. As a result, students will develop the reasoning skills to recognize properties of a distribution from its box plot.
Objectives
- Students will describe the overall pattern of a distribution by its shape, center, and spread.
- Students will recognize and identify properties of distributions such as symmetry, skewness, and bi-modality from boxplots.
- Students will identify outliers.
- Students will recognize that moving data past a quartile can affect that quartile’s value.
- Students will reason abstractly and quantitatively (CCSS Mathematical Practice).
Vocabulary
- boxplot
- inter-quartile range
- outlier
- skewness
- interval
- range
- symmetry
- distribution
- median
- quartile
About the Lesson
This lesson involves representing distributions of data using boxplots.
As a result, students will:
- Develop the reasoning skills to recognize properties of a distribution from its boxplot.
- Understand the relationship between individual data values and the five-number summary.
- Move data within a dot plot and observe the changes within the corresponding boxplot to identify particular actions that most directly affect the five-number summary.