Asking about shoes
The purpose of this activity is to engage students in setting up for a statistical investigation by posing a question within the context given.
About this resource
This activity assumes the students have experience in the following areas:
- Posing questions for data-based investigation.
- Exploring how to collect data that is needed to answer a question.
- Sorting and resorting data to look for patterns and differences.
- Answering questions using data.
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.
Asking about shoes
Achievement objectives
S1-1: Conduct investigations using the statistical enquiry cycle: posing and answering questions; gathering, sorting and counting, and displaying category data; discussing the results.
Required materials
See Materials that come with this resource to download:
- Asking about shoes activity (.pdf)
Activity
Some teachers like students to take their shoes off at the door, to keep dirt out of the classroom.
Find out about what you could expect to see piled up at the classroom door if your teacher asked you all to take your shoes off there.
- Pose a question to investigate.
- What sort of answer(s) do you expect to get?
The following prompts illustrate how this activity can be structured around the Problem and Plan parts of the Statistical Enquiry Cycle.
Problem
The problem section is about what data to collect and who to collect it from and why it’s important.
- What is my question? Why do I wonder about that?
- Why might my question be important?
- Are all the words (terms) in my question clear to someone else?
Plan
The planning section is about how students will gather the data.
- How will I go about answering this question?
- What will I need to know?
- How will I find the data that I need? Is the data already available somewhere or will I need to collect it?
- Have I thought about how I will sort the footware?
- Will I just look at footware for my class or look at other classes as well?
- Can I predict possible answers to my question, even before I look at data?
- What might my answer look like?
Examples of work
The student conjectures about what types of shoes are most common and creates an investigative question about shoes outside their classroom.
The student poses an investigative question that specifies the features of footware to measure. They conjecture several categories based on how the shoes are fastened.
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