Statistics
This list is desgined to support the teaching and learning of statistics.
Real Data: Statistics Projects for Key Stage Three
This resource from SMILE Mathematics consists of six themed handling data projects. Each project has teacher guidance giving possible hypothesis within the theme and also potential outcomes at different mathematical levels for each project under the headings: planning and collecting, processing and representing, interpreting and discussing.
The themes of the projects are:
• Average student
• Environment
• Fast hand
• Sport
• Transport
• World statistics
Analysing and Interpreting Data
This SMILE resource contains two packs of games, investigations, worksheets and practical activities.
Analysing and interpreting data pack one contains ten work cards with a wide variety of activities covering reading data from charts, practical activities to collect data, finding the mode, the median and the mean of a data set, and using statistics to break a code.
Analysing and interpreting pack two contains eight work cards with activities requiring students to use and interpret frequency graphs, analyse a data set, explore what is mean by the term ‘average’, group data, find the modal group, and use cumulative frequency curves.
Discussing Data
This resource from SMILE Mathematics contains 18 activities for discussing data.
The activities are split into six areas at three mathematical levels:
Comparing data: Travelling to school, Comparing Junes, Population pyramids
Interpreting line graphs: Going to the cinema, Cinema attendance, Households
Interpreting bar graphs: Olympic glory, Healthy eating, Spending money
Interpreting pie charts: How fit are you?, Keeping fit, Young and healthy
Displaying data: Showing it clearly, Which is cleaner?, Making sense
Questionnaire design: An average Year Seven student, An average Year Eight student, An average Year Nine student
Statistical Modelling
From the Integrating Mathematical Problem Solving project by Mathematics for Education and Industry (MEI), this activity for post-16 students shows how modelling helps decision making by allowing us to see what is likely to happen. The mathematical ideas covered are:
• Modelling cycle
• Binomial probability model
• Expected value
• Use of spreadsheets in modelling
Exploring Statistics
This resource is designed to provide a series of short problems to stimulate discussion of statistics amongst students and between students and teachers; and to provide some longer investigations which search more deeply into the student’s understanding of the statistics topics found in Advanced level courses.
Student material 1: what happens if? consists of sixty problems designed to test student’s understanding of the basic concepts and ideas in statistics and to help expose common misunderstandings and thus help students to resolve them. The problems cover descriptive statistics, probability, probability distributions and sampling.
Student material 2: short investigations contains ten short investigations. These cover a variety of topics and are at different levels. They all do have the potential to be completed in a fairly short time, although some could be developed further if required.
Student material 3: long investigations consists of ten longer investigations which cover a variety of topics and are suitable for students at different levels. These investigations will require more time than the short investigations, and the teachers will need to allocate time to the students to work on these.
Student material 4: statistics hints and nudges provides ‘hints and nudges’ for students. It is intended that these should be given out if a group experiences difficulties while tackling an investigation. They provide a more structured route through an investigation for those who need it..
Statistical Diagrams
Statistical diagrams covers: data collection; extracting data from tables, mileage charts and timetables; data presentation using stem and leaf diagrams, line graphs, tally charts, pie charts and frequency tables; the statistical measures of mean, mode, median and range; plotting scatter diagrams; lines of best fit and finding the equation of the line of best fit.
