Illuminations: About Our Class

About Our Class

In the following grades 6-8 lesson, students participate in activities in which they focus on the uses of numbers. The activities explore how students use numbers in school and every day settings as a way for students and the teacher to get to know each other at the beginning of the school year.

Learning Objectives
 
Students will be able to:
  • collect and analyze data
  • determine the arithmetic mean
  • represent data using percent

Materials
 

Instructional Plan

Background Information

In this activity, students collect and analyze data about a student's family and his or her personal interests.  Students determine the arithmetic mean and represent data using percent. 

Preparing the Investigation

Reproduce a copy of the activity sheet "About Our Class" for each student.

Structuring the Investigation

  1. Have the students complete survey questions a - g.  Discuss the results as a class. Ask students to think of a way to represent this information. Consider having groups of students construct a table to display the class's data for all responses to questions a - g.

  2. Have the students determine the mean number of people living in each house.  (Find the sum of the people in all the houses and divide this sum by the number of houses.) Define range as the difference between the numbers of people in the smallest and largest household, then ask for the range of the household size.

  3. Ask the class to report the total number and mean of the number of cars. Then ask how students could determine the percent of families that have at least one car. (Make a table showing the numbers of families with various numbers of cars, and then determine the percent of families with at least one car by dividing the number of families with one or more cars by the total number of families.)

  4. Have the class discuss the mean number of calculators in the families and the percent of families that have at least one calculator in their home. Remind the students that if they have at least one, they could have more than one.

  5. Ascertain the favorite activity for the class. Ask how this answer was determined.

  6. Discuss the difference between the number of time the most common favorite and the second-most-common-favorite TV shows were mentioned. The greater the difference between the two numbers, the greater is the likelihood that the favorite will still be the favorite in another sample.

  7. Discuss the completed graphs and questions from the class.

Extensions
 

Have students work in groups to create a way to organize the class's responses to each of the survey questions. Ask the students to display their data to the class.

NCTM Standards and Expectations
 
Data Analysis & Probability 6-8
  1. Use proportionality and a basic understanding of probability to make and test conjectures about the results of experiments and simulations.

References
 

  • Dianne Bankard and Francis (Skip) Fennell.   The Arithmetic Teacher. September, 1991.  pp 26 - 33.

  • Curcio, Frances R.  Developing Graph Comprehension:  Elementary and Middle School Activities. Reston, Va.: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1989.
  
2 periods   

NCTM Resources

Principles and Standards for School Mathematics

Web Sites
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