Univariate Project

I truly love the idea of giving projects to my students, it is amazing to watch them gather their own data on topics that interest them! I always allow the kiddos to choose a partner because math is simply more fun when you can discuss and collaborate with peers (just ask my co-author, RJ 😏).

For this project, students are asked to collect a set of univariate data dealing with something that interests them. For learners that struggle to come up with ideas, I lead them to CensusAtSchool. If you teach statistics and have never visited this website, it's a must for fast and easy data sets.

One of the main reasons I like this particular project is that students are collecting real data and their data sets are often not "clean" like the ones found in textbooks. I love to hear them dazzled by the fact that Q1 can actually equal the minimum - talk about an ugly boxplot! See the photo above for examples of student submissions.

For a copy of the student handout (actually, I email it to them) and rubric, click here. Speaking of rubrics, I'm not sure how you grade your projects, but I love using Google Sheets. To the right is the template of my spreadsheet for this project and what the students receive. I create a tab for each pair of students or project. But if you're interested, Alice Keeler (love her) has shared a Template Tab which will run a tab for each student and email them a link to their particular rubric - you just have to upload the information. This is a terrific tool that I have (of course) messed up. Apparently, once the tabs are created, you shouldn't rearrange them - I had a lot of students emailing me that they received the wrong rubric. Ugh. But life is full of trial and error!

I hope you can use this with your classes!

~SSB

Comments

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