Progression of Skills - Interpreting Shape, Center and Spread

Before this lesson:

Students should review finding the average from a small data set.  For example, if a student can complete this finding an Average (small set) with minimal help and with ease, they are ready for this toolkit lesson. 

Facilitator: This lesson involves a great deal of background knowledge in both content and terms. Please use this helpful background knowledge document to review before the lesson.

Students Do:

Find the average daily donation for a month-long fundraiser.

This Toolkit Lesson:

 Focuses on students becoming fluent in understanding measures of central tendency (mean, median, mode) and variability, graphical representation, and data sets.

Students Do:

Graph and analyze the distribution of incomes at a company. 

After this lesson:

Students should practice graphing data sets describing their center and spread by the shape of the data, and choosing the best measure of center and spread to describe the data set.

Students Do:

Students survey their peers on commuting times to school. They collect data, create a histogram to represent the distribution and use basic statistics to summarize and present their findings.