Well, we made it to the last week before Spring Break! Spring Break begins this Friday, 4/19. Students will return to school on Monday, 4/29. We will begin our first round of Smarter Balanced testing for math the week we come back from Spring Break. Please be sure to get lots of practice on the Smarter Balanced practice website HERE.
This week in math class we will continue our discussion of sampling, both the why (surveying or collecting data from the entire population is oftentimes too time consuming and/or expensive) and the how (asking every 5th student from a random list of all students in the school versus the students in the lunchroom at 10:30 on a given day, for example). We will be having a QUIZ on Tuesday on this topic (focusing on Lessons 13 & 14). We have discussed random samples and what can make a sample biased. We found that even when we thought we were generating random samples, we inherently add bias and can skew the results if we are not careful. This was evident in our "Casey at the Bat" activity from Lesson 14. Students were asked to pick 8 random words from the poem and then find the average word length. Words were then generated by drawing numbers from a bag to identify which word to select. This latter method resulted in a closer average word length to the true value than did the first method. Students had various reasons for selecting the words they did, but many times it was not based on randomness (they may have picked "long" words, "interesting" words or words relating to baseball). We will continue our discussion of sampling into the next few lessons and will also talk about sampling variability (what can make one random sample set differ from another even if both are truly "random"). The Quizizz code for this week is the same as last (I extended due to testing). Please be sure to finish by Thursday night. Code is 188351. All grades for Interim Progress reports are due by Thurs. and students will be receiving progress reports in Thursday folders on Thurs 5/2. Have a good week! Comments are closed.
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