End of term activities: Christmas…

See Christmas Resources for the always updated Christmas collection.

Studying Statistics with my Further Mathematicians I thought I would put some resources together. The use of Technology can really help with understanding here.

This GeoGebra applet allows students to move points and watch the effect on the line of best.

This can be used in class by asking students to plot the points, draw their lines of best fit and then comparing with the computer. This worked really well on my phone, I simply sent myself an email with the link and was able to move points easily. This could also be used with younger classes when talking about lines of best fit.

We can also demonstrate correlation coefficients and lines of best fit with this PhET simulation on Least Squares Regression.

Choose from a range of examples or choose Custom to add your own points and guess then check the correlation coefficient. You can also draw your own line of best fit and compare it to the theoretical line of best fit. Note the option to include residuals for both your own attempt and the line of best fit.

We can check Regression Calculations using this Linear Regression calculator from Social Science Statistics.

On the subject of correlation coefficients, we can play a game to see how well we can guess the correlation coefficient! Guess the Correlation Coefficient.

From Cambridge PhD student, Omar Wagih ‘Guess the Correlation‘, a rather addictive game with a purpose – Omar Wagih is collecting the data on the guesses collected and using it to analyse how we perceive correlations in scatter plots. Select About to read the rules and further details.

We also need to look at ranked data and students must be able to calculate Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient from raw data or summary statistics. Again, Social Science Statistics, offers us a calculator which will be useful for checking work.

Calculation details provide a useful check on work.

Note Social Science Statistics also has a calculator for calculating the Pearson correlation coefficient.

It’s December…it’s that time of year again…!
A collection of Mathematical Advent Calendars.

The Core Maths resources, now available on STEM Learning include many excellent Statistics resources. The resources are designed to enable students to use and apply statistics in unfamiliar contexts. There are several resources with large data sets available, very useful for students to get used to working with such data sets

Many of these resources could also be adapted for younger students, with my Year 10 students (UK age 14-15) I will use the data and parts of the questions from Averages and Spread: two which explores how to calculate and interpret different measures of location and dispersion.

If we look at the first question, for example, we have the data shown here. Students are required to calculate the mean, median, mode, interquartile range, range, variance and standard deviation (these last two we can save until Year 12).

I particularly like this interpretation question which we can use to give some context to the use of the upper quartile as here we have the upper quartile of 21.2 above the safe limit, suggesting that a quarter of scientists exceeded the safe limit.

The safe level for one year’s exposure is 20.0 mSv. Explain if the following statement is correct, using the data you have just calculated.

‘The scientists at CERN are working within the safe levels of radioactive exposure.’

Full solutions are given in the Teachers’ notes. The activity also includes questions on frequency distributions, one with grouped data.

Core Maths Support Program

We will also be able to review some charts and diagrams using these examples, drawing a box plot for the first example and a cumulative frequency chart for the grouped data example.

For some further useful resources, on TES we have a simple but effective exercise for students to practise drawing box plots by jhofmannmaths, a good example of a time-saving resource for teachers with ready drawn grids for students.

Looking at other resources by jhofmannmaths, I see many well-received resources; I like his simple but useful Expanding simple brackets mistakes which could be a useful Starter / Plenary (or anytime!).  Silly Suzie has made some errors! I appreciate resources like this with several copies to a page – very useful if you want to get a lesson started very promptly and have just changed room – it can be that the paper beats the technology!

Talking of silly Suzie reminds me of Erica and her errors by Andy Lutwyche. I used his  Erica’s Errors on Integration very successfully with Year 12 this week, many of whom made the same mistakes as Erica. We had some great discussions on how easy it is to make such errors and they seem to believe me more than ever that having a look at the graph is a really good idea!