Module 4

Hey Jess! Hope you had a great week. I really enjoyed this week's module. I'm loving the review of everything we will need to know to help our students.

Lost Teeth Video
In asking the students to estimate different ranges, the teacher is allowing them to think about how many teeth they believe kids lose at different ages, gaining background information and thinking more deeply about their question. It allows them to make a connection to the number of teeth lost in each grade. The students noticed when things were out of the norm, or outliers. For example, when the two girls are showing their representation and discussing what surprised them, they are surprised that a 1st grader has lost 12 teeth already, as well as there being a 1st grader who has not lost any teeth yet. They were able to analyze the range of their data really well and notice when certain ones had a large range, meaning that there was a significant difference in the number of teeth lost. They were able to find the mode, as well. The students really impressed me! One of them made a connection saying that someone who lost 12 teeth may have lost them because of the dentist rather than on their own. Guesses like this show that they are able to consider the data and why it may or may not be significant. In the third grade class, it was mentioned that some students had lost so many teeth they could not remember. This does make the graph a bit harder, as we saw last week, because some of the data is not numerical. They did a great job at explaining this, but they were a bit confused by the clump and what that may mean. How, as teachers, could we help explain this to them so they understand it better? Could they have represented this data in a different way to be seen better?

Stem and Leaf Plots

I remember learning stem and leaf plots in school and using them for place value. These articles were really more of a review than anything, but it did open my eyes to more possibilities! I love the idea of displaying students' birthdays on it, that's a great way to teach it to the students while making it personal to them. However, this may get a little confusing for younger grades if you introduce a stem and leaf plot in that way in the classroom and then teach it as place value instead of dates. Do you think this would confuse the students, or help them better understand? I remember when I first learned it, my teacher drew it as the shape of a branch with leaves. I saw this picture online and thought that this would be a great way to collect data as a class and represent it like this for them:

What is the difference between a bar graph and a histogram? 

While the two figures look very similar, they tell us two completely different things and are used with different sets of data. Right off the bat, you can tell the difference by weather or not the bars are touching. (I believe I messed this up, making a histogram-looking graph in stead of a bar graph the first week in one of our classes this semester. Oops!) In a bar graph, the bars will not touch, while in a histogram, they will. Bar graphs are used to show categorical data and they compare the variables of the data recorded. Histograms are used to show intervals of time, or frequency. It shows the frequency of a continuous set of data. For example, if you are plotting how many teeth each student lost, you could use a bar graph with the x-axis being the amount of teeth lost that year and the y-axis being how many students lost that many teeth. However, if you wanted to graph the teeth as they were lost throughout the year, you could use a histogram with the x-axis being amount of time passed and the y-axis being amount of teeth lost in the classroom. So in the first month, the students total could have lost 6 teeth. The second month, there were 4 lost. This data is continuous throughout the year, so the x-axis would show a range of time and the bars in the graph will be connected. Does this make sense? Can you think of a more simple, concise way to explain it?

Find an example of a line graph and share on your blog. Describe the data used in the graph and why the line graph is an appropriate representation. 

Below is a very simple, easy-to-read line graph. It is very basic and this type of graph can help students learn how to use a line graph in school. It simply shows the weather highs and lows for the upcoming week. As a class, this would relate to their environment and the students could collect the data to graph as a class, teaching them how a line graph works. It is appropriate because it shows the drops or increases in temperature, and it is visually appealing to easily see how much it will drop or raise that day, and the data is continuous. You can also see the range between the high and low for that day very easily. For example, Tuesday's range is a bit larger than Monday's. If this were done in a classroom, you could use another color to plot the weather each day and make the third line at the end of the week to compare it to the highs and lows.