This set of activities and lessons are designed to help clarify students understanding of correlation and regression. The lessons could be used several days in a row or spread out over the course of a few weeks, whichever suits the teacher’s schedule best. Students should have had a classroom discussion of correlation (i.e. positive slope and negative slope and what that relation means for those variables) in some respect before starting the lesson.
**This lesson could be used for students who have had experience in writing the equation of a line, i.e. Algebra I students. Students need not know the technical terms for the statistics they are doing.
I teach AP Statistics but this set of lessons could be used in any math class where the two topics are taught. The prerequisite knowledge necessary for the work here could be only algebra one content. If your students are more advanced then they should be aware of statistical symbols and some statistics formulas. The teacher may wish to tone down or jazz up any parts, or to exclude parts that are not applicable to their class.
The ISBE page is for the teacher to see what parts of the lesson and assessments meet the Illinois State goals and which goals they meet.
The necessary materials for this unit are computers with Internet access, a spreadsheet and access to a graphing calculator.
My instructional approach is a modified lecture. I would start off with the plan for the day, and then walk around the room and answer questions or question students to get them on the right track.
Have the students go through the motivational activity and make sure the students save the data. They will be using it again at the end of the lesson.
Special Notes for Motivational Activity
If your students are happy to answer one of the questions posed, please use that. You may wish to make each student or group of students answer their own question. You need to be aware of what the students are asking each other and make sure it is appropriate for school use. The question posed should not be offensive to any student, the teacher or the administration. Ownership of data is important, therefore, I would highly recommend several different student generated questions. It is important to remember to not skew your students by giving any indication of whether or not you feel the data are related.
Special Notes for Day 4
The teacher should lead a discussion on correlation after the students look at the example data. The point that should be brought out of students is that since the two areas are not related the points are scattered all over the graph and do not appear to be related.
For the data you collect with your class, you should try to pick two things that you feel will not be related and then two things that will. This can be difficult as each class has their own data and what works for one teacher will not necessarily work for anyone else. You should probably know you class pretty well by the time you do this activity. If you don't, find some canned data that will serve your purpose. I would also recommend using small set of data so that your class calculations can be done on the board or overhead by hand by the teacher, as yet another way of reinforcing the concepts. By this I mean, drawing the scatter plot and then asking if there is a relationship. A graphing calculator with overhead would be very useful.