Descriptive Statistics Unit Project - 13 Topics Covered, Print and Digital
- PDF
What educators are saying
Description
I used this for the first time this year and I REALLY liked it. We have a very short statistics unit in Math 1 in North Carolina, and I have always hated that unit because it just feels like an afterthought at the end of the year when the kids are as burnt out as you are. But this worked WELL!!
The way it works is this: the student picks two topics where they can find at least 20 pieces of data. Examples include population of states east of the Mississippi or the number of points scored in the last 20 games by your favorite basketball player. There are 16 example topics included, but students can stray from that if their topic is a good source of data. From there, the project walks them right through everything they need to know for this unit. They collect the data, then they find mean, median, mode, and range, then they do a histogram, dot plot, and box plot (with five number summary,) then they find interquartile range, outliers, standard deviation, and distribution of data. They are not required to find standard deviation by hand or to really understand it, but they are introduced to it.
Since the project builds upon itself, once they get to the end, they're done. You will notice that I required students to not just do this project on one set of data. They must do two sets of data and find all of the statistical data for each. I did this for a number of reasons. First, the stronger students should be able to better understand the statistical topics if they are applying the knowledge to two unlike data sets. Second, it's just practice, and that's good for all of them. Third, if you need to modify the project down to one set of data, it's easy to do. This project does not have a rubric included. I usually like doing that, but I think this project requires a little more discretionary grading on the part of the teacher and a rubric seemed too difficult to apply uniformly. I hope you like the project. It worked really, really well for me. As always, though, if you have suggestions for how I can make it better, feel free to leave them in your review. Thanks for your business!!
**Please note that this is also a DIGITAL version. On the very last page of the PDF, you will be given a link that you can click to "Make a Copy" of the Google doc. This means you can use the activity with Google Classroom, have students do a solely electronic version, or edit the copy you make in order to make any changes you may need to personalize it for your class.
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