Mystery Balancers

1. Investigations Unit 9 Session 1.2 Mystery Balancers

2. If we collected balancing data from another fifth-grade class, what would you expect the results to look like? What would surprise you? What would you expect typical times to be? What times would not be typical? What would you expect about the range? Would you expect the data to be very spread out or concentrated around certain values? Let’s look at another class’ data.

3. Another Fifth Grade Class In this class, were students better at balancing on their right foot or left foot? What do you see as evidence for that?

4. Another Fifth Grade Class When statisticians report about data, they often report a value that represents the group of data as a whole in some way. If you were going to choose a number of seconds that gives an idea of about how long these fifth graders could stand on their right foot, what would you say? What about the MEDIAN number???

5. Another Fifth Grade Class How do the medians for the left foot and the right foot compare? What does it mean that the median for the right foot is higher than that for the left foot? What does it tell us about students balancing on their right foot compared with students balancing on their left foot? If the median for the right foot is 52, how many students balanced for 52 seconds or more? If the median for the left foot is 18, how many students balanced for 18 seconds or less?

6. Mystery Balancers . . . Four additional data sets have been collected on balancing on one foot. Work together with your partner to compare how the mystery data sets are similar and how they are different. Use your comparisons of the data to determine which mystery data set you think matches each group. What aspects of the data might you compare to help you determine the identities of the mystery data? Would it be helpful to find the median or range of the data? On your recording sheet, remember that you are not just making a hypothesis. You must justify your hypothesis using the data provided.