Statistics

Chapter 20 | Statistical literacy

These are problem solving open-ended questions that require students to be able to investigate statistical literacy. They can be given at the start of a topic and done as the students gain enough knowledge to complete them, inserted into a topic at an appropriate place, or given as homework, or extension.

Evaluate the statements made by others about the results of their statistical investigation or probability experiment.
Evaluate the methods used, such as posing the question, planning, data collection etc, during a statistical investigation or probability experiment.

Teaching ideas

This link displays the Getting started on page 361.

Ask students to design their own advertisement with a misleading statement.
You could ask students to look in newspapers and magazines and online for examples of misleading graphs, tables or statements.

This link displays some graphs that are deliberately misleading and asks students to discuss why.

Teacher notes

Students could use Extra Task 72 - Evaluate someone else’s survey to help with this chapter. It provides a checklist of what should be included and carried out in a statistical investigation.
Emphasise that selecting the group of people to be surveyed is important.
- The number of people must be large enough to represent the whole population.
- The sample must not be biased in any way or this will lead to biased results.
- The questions must be clear and have all options covered in the answers offered.
- The questions must not show the surveyor’s opinions.
You might choose to lead some of the activities in the chapter yourself as class activities or group activities.

For Activity 3, you might need to explain what an “app” is. It is a piece of software used for a specific purpose on mobile devices such as phones or tablets.
You could download the data from Chapter 20 - Activity 3 - Question 3 into a spreadsheet and then use the filtering or sorting function to show up trends or relationships. For example, filtering out the “no” responses, or filtering and comparing by gender, or by who buys the software.
The data could be sorted according to cost or time played. Sometimes graphs are not the best way to compare multi-variate data.
To sort and filter in a spreadsheet:

1 Highlight the whole table.

2 Click on the Sort and Filter icon at the top right of the screen.

3 To sort data click Custom Sort and a new window will be displayed.

4 If the data has headers to the columns, tick the box ‘My data has headers’.

5 Use drop-down arrows in Sort By to select the column that you want sorted.

6 To filter data at step 3, click Filter and drop-down arrows will appear on all the headers in your table.

7 Click on any arrow and in the drop-down box you can filter out specific sets of text by unticking that box.