Scatter Plots &Line of Best Fit

By: Matt MiddaghA topic intended for high school (9-12)

Technology Integration Rationale

When teaching a lesson on scatter plots and line of best fit, technology is necessary to gain a large quantity of data from various sources, assist in plotting graphs and can help create the line of best fit. Using technology students can research up to date data and interesting statistics regarding meaningful topics to them. Technology is also a great way to reinforce previously learned skills through the endless games and projects offered.

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Internet Content

• The Internet offers a wide array of content related to statistics. There are numerous resources for students of all ages from games to work on their skills to projects relating to real life current issues or topics of interest. The internet also offers numerous instructional videos for students to gain an extra edge amongst their classmates. There is endless data, constantly updating, which provide opportunities for students to do research to a topic of interest to them.

Blogs

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Podcasts

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YouTube Video

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Internet Resources

The internet offers a wide variety of statistical data that students and teachers can use to pull data from to help assist in teaching a lesson on scatter plots and line of best fit. The following three slides gives three examples of government agencies which can offer material regarding this topic.

(click to access website)

The United States Census is a great source for data relative to the people living in the U.S. Students can use to data provided by the census to gather information of people from the entire country and try to find relationships between different statistics or different parts of the country.

The National Center for Education Statistics is a great website which offers data relating to schools and education around the country. This is a great way for students to compare statistics which may hit them more at home, as they pertain directly to them and the education system that they are currently going through. This website offers information and statistics regarding real problems and situations that are going on in the school systems today.

(click to access website)

Monitoring the future is a website setup through the University of Michigan, and it contains information regarding the behaviors and attitudes of students in high schools and colleges. It also offers publications and survey projects. Students can use this source to find information and interpret whether there is a relationship between two behaviors or attitudes.

(click to access website)

Steps to Finding Line of Best Fit

Teaching Materials

Above is a project and a worksheet from Yummymath.com. The first is one involving the popular board game Monopoly where students are required to check for a relationship between the amount of rent and spaces from go for a property. The other is a worksheet which has students practice plotting points and coming up with relationships and equations for the line of best fit

(click to access project)(click to access worksheet)

Teaching Materials Cont.

Above is a link to a sports reference page, where I plan to use for a project or performance task. It will involve students selecting data from their favorite sports, then comparing two statistics. They will find if there is any correlation between something like wins and losses, then they will have to do box-and-whisker plots for the data as well.

(click to access site)

Teaching Materials Cont.

Onlinemathlearning.com offers a wide variety of statistics games for students to play to review the topics being discussed in class. It also offers worksheets that can be used for later lessons in statistics.

Subject Specific Internet Source

This website is a great resource for teaching any level of math. Teachers can find activities and lesson plans for just about any subject. Teachers can search by grade level or subject matter.

Internet Uses

Online Statistics Education is an online textbook developed in Rice University as well as University of Houston Clear Lake and Tufts University. It offers a textbook in statistics that students can access for free, as well as simulations to accompany each section.

Internet Uses Cont.

http://www.shodor.org/interactivate/activities/ScatterPlot/

This is a interactive website where students can

input data points on to a customized graph, generate a line of best fit, and even print out their graphs to turn in as assignments.

WolframAlpha is an app available for iPhone, iPad, and Android. It is a great app for math reference. Students can type in any equation and get an explanation and solution for it. You can also look up vocabulary terms for examples and descriptions.

Web 2.0

Evernote is where students can share notes with each other, as well as collaborate with others on projects and upload them for teacher access and comment on.

Rubrics

Rubistar makes it easy to create rubrics for projects where students are asked to do research and create their own scatter plots. I can use the rubric generator to assess them on things like neatness of the work, accuracy, their data tables and much more.