In this section, students focus on describing distributions. In particular, they learn to describe the center and spread of a distribution by using informal language to refer to a typical value for a distribution and how spread out the data are. They use dot plots and histograms to represent data, and use the visualization to describe features of a distribution...

In this section, students begin to quantify their understanding of center and spread by finding values for the mean and mean absolute deviation (MAD). The mean is explained as a way of fairly sharing as well as a balance point to give additional intuition into the measure of center.

Then, students see that, even with the same mean, distributions can...

In this section, students consider much larger populations to motivate the need to sample to obtain data. This leads to considering how some samples may be more representative of the population than others and the idea that random selection is more likely to produce representative samples.

Then students use samples to gain information about the populations they represent. In particular,...

This section is optional because it gives a light introduction to probability, which is not essential for the unit’s main focus on statistics. In this section, students learn how to quantify the likelihood of events using probability. First, they list the sample space for a chance experiment and use it to assign values to the likelihood, such as 50% or...