Describing Distributions Using Shoe Sales Forecast.Here are 3 activities that I found compelling:

These lessons serve as great application opportunities to whatever you are learning in class. Filter by subject, topic, or lesson type. If you haven’t had an opportunity to explore PBS Learning Media, check it out! Everything is free and there are many real-world examples and videos complete with lesson plans. They are then asked to graph this data in various ways. (Find it inside this 6th Grade Statistics bundle.) Students take a survey of the class and calculate the interquartile range, mean, median, and mean absolute deviation. Maneuvering the Middle’s performance task is perfect for this.

Data from their own lives – Students can use information from their classmates, friends, or themselves.

Real-time data – Using a similar format, ask students to track their own usage data over different forms of technology over the course of the week.

Display everyone’s graphs and complete a gallery walk where students use Post-it Notes to write down questions and observations.

Sports data – Students pick a team and create a histogram or box plot to represent the data of the athletes’ heights, years playing, or whatever applicable data point students find interesting.

Have students collect data about something they are interested in and put the data in whatever display you are teaching over the course of the unit: dot plots, box plots, histograms, circle graphs, etc. Just me? So I thought I would round up some data and statistics activities to end this school year with a bang. Data and statistics is such a fun topic to teach in middle school math! The relevance and hands-on nature of analyzing and displaying data made it engaging for my students and myself! Data and statistics usually fell to the very last unit in my scope and sequence which meant I was tired, and the amount of creative energy I had to put into my lessons was waning.

Fun desmos activity