Elaboration on this Achievement Objective
The statistical enquiry 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:
At Level Three 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 should be multivariate so it should include many variables, for example gender, age, height, eye colour, bedtime, etc., so that relationships between the variables can be explored. Students should be able to ask summary questions (of a variable), for example what is the usual range in height for 10-year-old students?, comparison questions, for example are girls taller than boys?, and relationship questions, for example do older students go to bed later than younger students? Data displays, including tables and graphs, expected at Level Three are tally charts, frequency tables, pictographs, bar graphs, strip graphs, and pie charts for category data, dot plots and stem and leaf graphs for whole-number data, and simple line graphs for time series data. Students should be able to use computer technology to create these displays to find patterns, including trends over time, in data as well as to communicate their findings to others. They should be able to justify their choice of display/s with reference to the patterns they wish to highlight.