Activity Overview
This lesson involves investigating aspects of statistical information reported in the media or other venues, aspects that are often misunderstood by those unfamiliar with sampling.
Objectives
- Students will recognize that samples from a population typically have smaller variability than the population.
- Students will recognize that many reported patterns are really nothing but random noise and not patterns at all.
- Students will recognize that small samples might have more variability than large samples.
Vocabulary
- distribution
- boxplots
- interquartile range (IQR)
- mean
- median
- sample
About the Lesson
This lesson involves investigating aspects of statistical information reported in the media or other venues, aspects that are often misunderstood by those unfamiliar with sampling.
As a result, students will:
- Look at a randomly-generated distribution of student achievement scores for a whole grade and for the individual classes in that grade
- Analyze boxplots of the data and observe the variation among the classes, identifying a class that seems to have higher scores.
- Analyze the distribution of the mean scores for each class in the grade and relate it to the distribution of the scores for the entire grade.
- Choose one of the teachers' classes and examine the scores for that teacher across consecutive years, looking for trends or seemingly large changes.