This optional lesson is a good opportunity for students to use the information that they have learned in the unit and to apply it to different situations, but it may be shortened to fit time constraints. After the Warm-up, reinforcing interpretations of box plots in context, a few options are available for activities depending on the needs of the class.

In the first pair of activities, students have the option of calculating measures of center and variability by hand or by using a digital applet to do the calculation, and they then focus on interpreting these measures in context. They also have the option of creating visual representations of the distribution or viewing them in a digital applet, and they then decide which representation best shows the distribution (MP4).

If students are proficient with calculating statistics and understanding visual representations of data, the next activity gives students a chance to interpret real-world data and draw a conclusion about an environmental situation. Students analyze the summary of data and use it to construct an argument about the state of fish in a lake (MP3).

A third option is digital only and gives students a chance to work with a large data set. This can highlight the power of summarizing a distribution with a measure of center and a measure of variability to tell the story, rather than looking at the raw data or a visualization that shows all of the information (MP5).