The purpose of this activity is to engage students in posing a question for investigation and designing an investigation that could be used by the class.
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.
A year 5 & 6 class has just been told that the school is going to upgrade the school library.
Their teacher has said that this would be a great opportunity for the class to find out how that money should be spent...the teacher suggested lots of shiny new books. Immediately, hands shot up around the class and the students suggested that bean bags, comfy seating, e-readers and fast internet were much more important for the school library to get. The teacher thought about this and said…”Let’s find out how people use a library. Then we can use our data to make suggestions for the school library.”
Pose a question for the class to investigate and construct a survey to carry out amongst the school community. This will include students, teachers and parents as they all have an interest in how the library is used.
The following prompts illustrate how this activity can be structured around the first two 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 student writes an investigation question. They creates a survey to find out information about the items to purchase for the new library.
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The student writes an investigation question. They consider how they will sample the school community and create a survey to find out information about the items to purchase for the new library.
Printed from https://nzmaths.co.nz/resource/books-vs-bean-bags-part-1 at 3:17am on the 21st April 2024