Statistical Investigations Part 1: Introduction to the PPDAC cycle
The lesson plans in this teaching unit were developed in conjunction with the TLRI research project: Building students’ inferential reasoning: statistics curriculum levels 5 and 6.
While each series of activities are set up as lesson plans, they may take more or less than a lesson of class time. They form a possible sequence of learning and each block works together with the other blocks. The lessons are developed using CensusAtSchool (2009) data, they could be adapted to any data set or any year of CensusAtSchool.
Block 1: Introduction to the PPDAC cycle, posing investigative questions and writing descriptions for summary and comparison investigative questions.
Lesson 1: PPDAC Cycle
- Reflect on Level 4 work
- PPDAC Cycle
- Introduce CensusAtSchool data set
- Setting up the context
Lesson 2: Posing Investigative Questions
- Posing investigative questions
- Initial look at making displays using data cards
- Starting to think about what makes a good investigative question
- Setting up the context
Lesson 3: Single distribution descriptions
- Describing summary type graphs
- Writing conclusions to questions
Lesson 4: Comparison descriptions
- Describing comparison type graphs
- Writing conclusions to questions
