Starting a statistical inquiry

WALT: plan for a statistical enquiry

This lesson shows how we began our statistical inquiry about the teachers strike that has recently happened.

The purpose of this lesson was for students to understand how to understand the problem that is being investigated, and how we can formulate questions to help give us data about how people feel about the teachers strike. We spoke about what data is, how we can collect it, and whom we can collect it from.

Click here to see the extended plan

Lesson reflection: Statistical inquiries were new to my students, so there was a lot more teacher talk than what I would have liked to do. Overall, I feel the students were able to create a clear set of guidelines for their statistical inquiry. Using Padlet was a great tool for this, as the students were able to work collaboratively, and their responses to all prompts were all in one easy to manage place.

I am still continuing to work on students ability to actively listen to their group members ideas, instead of cutting in over the top of them. It is a balance between keeping the excited energy (because they want to share) while also ensuring that the group is actually taking turns and listening to their class mates opinions. I left these bits in the video to remind myself that I need to improve on this in the future.

Providing real world contexts for my learners helps them to understand tricky concepts. I have done this a few times in this lesson, and it really helped (especially when I touched on qualitative data).

Something to note 1: I accidentally deleted the footage from my second camera, hence why only one camera angle was used.

Class site content

Click here to view the 'Class OnAir' page that is on my class site.

Statistical Enquiry 2018

We worked on slides 1-3 during this lesson

Extra footage

Explaining what 'data' is

I also touched on the different types of data, being numerical and words (quantitative and qualitative). I used the example of the end of term surveys I send to help them understand the different types of data.

Who should we gather data from?

Here we shared our ideas and discussed our ideas about who we should involve in our statistical inquiry.

Extra footage: discussing results of the survey

This wasn't a planned lesson, however I noticed the group were really interested in how teachers resononded to our class survey. I was on release, so took the opportunity to record their discussion.

Apologies for the terrible filming angle. Originally I was planning to capture the students discussion by themselves, however they did often ask me questions. Sorry that my face is cut out and that you only can see my stomach!

It was also great to see the students starting to notice key themes/ideas emerging from the responses. This was fantastic as we will be building on this when we analyse the written responses in the next episode (quantitaive and qualitative data).

Should students come to the strike?

After paying bills...

Learner generated content

Note: at first students worked in pairs, then we decided to share all our ideas on a Google Doc. This is where we spoke about the best type of question to use (eg linear scale instead of multi-choice. The final link on the right is the whole class Google Form. This was taken from usi