S2-1: Conduct investigations using the statistical enquiry cycle: posing and answering questions; gathering, sorting, and displaying category and whole-number data; communicating findings based on the data.
This means students will use the statistical enquiry cycle in their investigations. The cycle has five phases that relate to each other. Some enquiries follow these phases in sequence but often new considerations mean that a statistician must go back to previous phases and rethink. The phases are:
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At Level Two students should be able to pose questions that they want to investigate, consider the appropriate data they need to collect, gather and sort the data in order to develop an answer to their question. The data involved may be either category data or whole number data. Category data arises from classifying and the interest is in how many of the data items fall in each category (called frequency). Colour and number of doors are two ways to classify cars that will produce category data. Whole number data comes from situations where only whole number values are possible, for example how many people live in your house? or from rounding of measures, for example how long is your pencil to the nearest centimetre? The most common graphs for displaying category data are pictographs, bar, strip and pie graphs. Whole number data can be displayed using dot plots or stem and leaf graphs. Students should communicate their result through reference to their data displays with an emphasis on similarity and difference, for example boys like outdoor games more than girls.
In this unit we conduct a number of investigations using a party or favourites theme. Students count, compare, organise, analyse, display and interpret data and at the same time, apply early additive strategies for combining numbers.