Data Handling
During this unit, students will begin to understand how useful graphic organisation can be when evaluating and communicating data. Throughout this time, students will have opportunities to work with data in a variety of ways. They will interpret data presented in graphs, tables, line graphs and pie charts and learn to calculate averages including, mean, median and mode. In addition, students will begin to evaluate the effectiveness of different displays in illustrating data features and make choices on how to best represent data they have collected. This unit will prepare students for collating and interpreting data they will use in the Grade 5 Expo.
Key questions
- How do we collect data systematically?
- How do people make sense of the data in a graph/chart/infographic?
- How can a graph/chart/infographic be a helpful way to communicate information?
- How do you calculate the mean, median and mode for a set of data?
- How do people represent real life situations graphically?
Students need to be able to make sense of graphs and to extrapolate meaning from them, beyond the information provided. They need to become data detectives to try and understand the story that the graphs are telling them.
For example, look at this line graph:
What could it be showing? What could it be showing if the horizontal axis showed time? What could it be showing if the vertical axis also showed rainfall? How might this be a useful graph for farmers, tourists, environment agencies, festival planners? What additional information would make this graph more useful? Would a different way of representing the data make this a more useful graph?
Infographics are an increasingly common way to share data. What can we learn from the way they present information?
Students will be applying their graphing skills to help make sense of data during their Expo investigations. Below, a 3D block graph has been chosen to represent the change (comparison) in numbers of shark species between two dates.
Next unit... Pattern and Function
