Introduction

Data overwhelms our modern lives. How to make sense of the numbers in newspaper stories, in campaign speeches, in scientific experiments? Statistics offers tools to help us organize and interpret data. Even at the middle school level, students can work with statistics in real-world situations, whether actual or simulated.

In this publication, we offer lesson ideas on Teaching the Basics, those core statistical concepts to be covered in the middle school curriculum, such as the mean and the median, box-and-whisker plots, and scatter plots. Tools for Displaying Data supports this teaching. This section contains applets for creating representations of data, meaningful “pictures” that capture the data visually.

Beyond the required curriculum topics, sections on Activities and Projects offer problems, provocative questions, and hands-on experiments that engage students in their own collection and analysis of data.

Under Background Information for Teachers are professional opportunities for review of statistical concepts as well as resources for classroom support. The final section considers statistics in the NCTM Standards.

by Terese Herrera

Terry Herrera taught math several years at middle and high school levels, then earned a Ph.D. in mathematics education. She is a resource specialist for the NSDL Middle School Portal. Please email any comments to msp@msteacher.org

There’s More! You’ll know when new math publications are posted on NSDL Middle School Portal by requesting free email notices at http://msteacher.org/registration.aspx. Don’t forget to browse the Mathematics Pathway every once in a while to find a wealth of resources for your teaching.

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Copyright June 2008 — The Ohio State University. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0424671. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.