In this section, students continue to build community by collecting data from their classmates, classifying the different kinds of data they might collect, and creating displays of the information that they collected.

The optional second lesson gives students a chance to practice creating dot plots, histograms, and box plots using given data before attempting to do the same with the data that they collected. This lesson would be an opportunity to introduce any technological tools the class will use for creating these displays.

Students work to describe distributions of data using terms such as “symmetric,” “skewed,” “uniform,” “bimodal,” and “bell-shaped.” 

An optional lesson is included to remind students of prior learning about measures of center and measures of variation so that those terms can be included in distribution descriptions. Even if the optional lesson is skipped, consider creating a display about the measures of center and variability, like the one mentioned in a Synthesis of this lesson.

In this optional section students are introduced to using spreadsheets to create basic formulas and interpret results. It is assumed that students know nothing about spreadsheets. If students are proficient at using spreadsheets as computation tools, this sequence of lessons can be safely skipped. This technology is useful for interpreting data in this unit and is also used to examine functions in a subsequent unit.

Because this entire section is optional, no checkpoint questions are included.

In this section, students are introduced to additional tools to analyze data such as standard deviation and outliers. They finish the section by using all of these tools to compare similar data sets.

Note that in this unit, all standard deviations refer to the population standard deviation () calculation rather than the sample standard deviation ().

If students are using GeoGebra or the Spreadsheet tool in Math Tools to create a histogram, there is an issue when the maximum value is on the boundary of the greatest interval. In this case, GeoGebra includes the maximum value with the previous interval rather than following the convention of creating a new bar for the next interval. Address this issue with students if they are using either of those tools.

Dot plot from 30 to 75 by 1's. Tree height in forest A in feet. Beginning at 30, number of dots above each increment is 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 4, 3, 4, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0.

The final section of this unit is a lesson where students have the opportunity to apply their thinking from throughout the unit. As this is a short section followed by an End-of-Unit Assessment, there are no section goals or checkpoint questions.