Middle Grades Math: One Year Makes a Difference

Objectives

• Students will construct and interpret box plots and histograms of data to draw informal comparisons about two populations.
• Students will compare using medians, quartiles, maximums, minimums, ranges, interquartile ranges, and shapes and clustering patterns found in distributions.

Vocabulary

• box plot
• histogram
• median
• mean
• lower and upper Quartiles
• Interquartile Range (IQR)
• outlier
• bin width

About the Lesson

This lesson involves drawing informal comparative inferences about two populations.
As a result, students will:

• Construct the box plots and histograms to informally compare two samples of data.
• Compare the bench press strengths of seventh and eighth grade males, the heights of seventh and eighth grade females, and the shuttle times of seventh and eighth grade males with a focus on medians, quartiles, minimums, maximums and the shapes of distributions.
• Compute, by hand, the five number summaries without technology and then confirm using technology.