The purpose of this activity is to engage students in the evaluation of a published statistical report.
This activity assumes the students have experience in the following areas:
The problem is sufficiently open ended to allow the students freedom of choice in their approach. It may be scaffolded with guidance that leads to a solution, and/or the students might be given the opportunity to solve the problem independently.
The example responses at the end of the resource give an indication of the kind of response to expect from students who approach the problem in particular ways.
In the newspaper article, ‘Which Social Media for Teens?’, it was reported that young people are using different forms of social media than they did a few years ago.
Read the article below and comment on whether the reporter’s statements are consistent with the survey data.
Which Social Media for Teens?
It looks like Facebook is no longer cool amongst the teens of today. Instagram and Twitter have taken over the most popular social networks among American children and these kids are ditching Facebook.
Research has shown that today’s teens are no longer using Facebook. Rather, they are using Instagram and Twitter. There has been a steady decline in the usage of Facebook, with all other social networks increasing in popularity. Surveys of 15,000 social network users between the ages of 13 and 19 over the past three years, gave the following results:
Source: This article has been created for the purpose of this statistics exercise and is not from any publication.
This problem involves evaluating a statistical report. Evaluation requires students to consider whether the author reports on parts of the Statistical Enquiry Cycle.
The problem section is about what data to collect and who to collect it from and why it’s important.
The planning section is about how students will gather the data.
The data section is concerned with how the data is managed and organised.
The analysis section is about exploring the data and reasoning with it.
The conclusion section is about answering the question in the problem section and providing reasons based on their analysis.
The students lists the main claims within the report. They find facts from the data that are relevant to each argument and take a position that Facebook is still widely used by teens.
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The students takes an informed position about claims in the report. They consider both data in the report and their contextual knowledge to evaluate the claims.
Printed from https://nzmaths.co.nz/resource/popular-networking at 9:05pm on the 23rd April 2024