Measuring Variability
Chapter 1 - Day 10 - Lesson 1.7
Chapter 1
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Day 17
Day 18
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Learning Targets
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Find the range of a distribution of quantitative data.
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Find and interpret the interquartile range.
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Calculate and interpret standard deviation.
Activity: How Many Colleges Are You Applying To?
Activity:
Answer Key:
For this activity we did not want 30 pieces of data since we wanted to model the process for calculating standard deviation. So each group of four created a list of all the colleges they were applying to and reported the total. This gave us 7 or 8 pieces of data per class. Students used the class data to find quartiles in their groups. Everything went fairly smoothly.
Calculating Standard Deviation
So we are going to try to run this whole class with no calculators….just iPads. Today I have students working with one iPad for each pair of students. This allows students to help each other if they are not familiar with the use of an iPad. I demonstrated the use of the iPad by beaming my iPad to the projector using an Apple TV. This process is not yet seamless but will hopefully getting better.
Using the Text
We also had students begin annotating the text in their groups. Each person was assigned two pages of the section to read and annotate. After their members finished, they shared with the rest of the group what they had learned. Some really good discussions happened during this time. The students took the task really seriously. Using the document camera we showed the class what we had highlighted and annotated in our text so they could compare what they had done. As we go through the year, we will be putting more of this responsibility on the students.
Have We Found the Beef?
Application 1.7
Overall, this application is pretty straight forward. The only common mistake students made was trying to decide whether or not to include the middle number in each half of the data when they were looking for the quartiles without the applet. Students used the iPads and the SPA applet to calculate standard deviation since we will not be requiring them to calculate this by hand.