Books vs bean bags - Part 1
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.
About this resource
This activity assumes the students have experience in the following areas:
- Construct graphs and tables to display category data.
- Analyse category data to answer investigation questions.
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.
Books vs bean bags: Part 1
Achievement objectives
S3-1: Conduct investigations using the statistical enquiry cycle: gathering, sorting, and displaying multivariate category and whole number data and simple time-series data to answer questions; identifying patterns and trends in context, within and between data sets; communicating findings, using data displays.
Required materials
See Materials that come with this resource to download:
- Books vs bean bags activity - Part 1 (.pdf)
Activity
A year 5 and 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.
Problem
The problem section is about what data to collect, who to collect it from, and why it’s important.
- What is my investigation question? Why do I wonder about that? (The question needs to be clearly written and relevant to the issue.)
- How will I gather data to find out people’s views?
- How will I best measure their views?
Plan
The planning section is about how students will gather the data.
- How will I go about answering this question?
- What practical issues will I need to consider?
- How long should my survey be so I gather enough data, but the survey does not take too long to conduct?
- What should my questions be about?
- Should my question have restricted answers or be open?
- Why might I choose these styles of questions?
- How will I make sure the questions are clear to anyone who responds?
- How will I avoid leading statements in my questions or restricting answers too much?
- What sample will I use? Can I justify why I chose that sample?
Examples of work
The student writes an investigation question. They creates a survey to find out information about the items to purchase for the new library.
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.
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