Entry 31 – A Middle School Statistics Project

So we have one week of content left in our classes, a week of review, and then finals week.  We are winding down.

PRE-ALGEBRA STATS PROJECT

In Pre-Algebra, we just finished our percents unit, which was pretty short.  It could’ve actually been a part of the previous ratios and proportions unit (as I had them create proportions to solve all of the percent problems) but I just opted to make it it’s own one-lesson unit.  Last year I started to get into compound interest and it was OK but didn’t have the time to really do that this year.

So I had to decide what to do with the last week before our review week.  There’s always 2-3 units that I never get to in the year (Geometry & Statistics)Two years ago I taught transformations in the last few weeks.  Last year I taught area and volume of various shapes.  This year I decided to see what I could do with statistics.  Most of them have had a little bit of experience with mean, median, mode, and range, and some experience creating bar graphs.  After looking at a variety of statistics project, I just went with the ‘ol ‘have them take a survey and analyze the data’ project.  I’m going to have them make a box plot, histogram, and back-to-back stem&leaf or back-to-back histogram.  They’ll write analyzing questions about each graph and answer them.  In one of the graphs, they have to see the answers between gender differences and see if there’s any correlation in the data between gender and answer and pose questions about why those correlations may or may not be there.

Here’s the checklist, here’s the template I made for them to put their info (using Google Classroom’s ‘make a copy for each student’ feature), and here’s my example.  I created data for ‘how many tacos have you eaten this year.’  We’ll see how it goes.  Students were super stoked about doing it.

MATH SKILLS

In Math Skills, we are just finishing up our ratios unit as well.  They’re learning how to simply take a percent of a number but without proportions.  Took our second quiz today and will review next week, test, and then start reviewing for the final exam.

FINALS EXAMS

I’m contemplating if I want the final exam to be full year or just semester content in both my classes.  This year was the first year that we didn’t have mid-terms.  My natural tendency is to just say full-year because I’d like one final assessment to see if they got the gist of the course content.  With the content that sort of spiraled throughout all year ( ie. operations with integers), that won’t be as difficult to throw in there, but what about number sets?  Is that super necessary?  Hm.  Then do I put the content we just finished on there?  I just assessed them on it, but does it need to be on the final just because it’s a final?  Hm.  What do you do for your final?