Why bother with statistics in middle school? One answer: data analysis is one of the NCTM Standards and an 8th grade Focal Point. But even more important, in my experience, is that statistics links math to real problems.
Working Hours: How Much Time Do Teens Spend on the Job?
This activity challenges students to interpret a bar graph, showing only percentages, to determine the mean number of hours teenagers work per week. A more complicated and interesting problem than it may seem at first glance!
Train Race
In this interactive game, students compute the mean, median, and range of the running times of four trains, then select the one train that will get to the destination on time. Their goal is to find the most reliable train for the trip.
The Global Sun Temperature Project
This web site allows students from around the world to work together to determine how average daily temperatures and hours of sunlight change with distance from the equator. Students learn to collect, organize, and interpret data. You will find project information, lesson plans, and implementation assistance at the site.
Down the Drain: How Much Water Do You Use?
In this Internet-based collaborative project, your students share information about water usage with other students from around the country and the world. Based on data collected by their household members and their classmates, students will determine the average amount of water used by one person in a day. Students must develop a hypothesis, conduct an experiment, and present their results.
100 People: A World Portrait Detailed Statistics
You’ve heard the idea before: What if the whole world were represented by 100 people? It is mind-boggling, for example, to realize that 61 would be from Asia and only 5 from North America. This page gives a full list of the data collected, links to a lesson plan and to commentary on the statistics. Excellent for an interdisciplinary project!
If you’d like to focus attention on measures of central tendency, these last two sites help explain the mean and the median though interactive online practice.
Plop It!
Users click to easily and quickly build dot plots of data and view how the mean, median, and mode change as numbers are added to the plot. An efficient tool for viewing these statistics visually.
Comparing Properties of the Mean and the Median Through the Use of Technology
This interactive tool allows students to compare measures of central tendency. As students change one or more of the seven data points, the effects on the mean and median are immediately displayed. Questions challenge students to explore further the use of these measures of center; for example, What happens if you pull some of the data values way off to one extreme or the other extreme?
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