Lesson 4

In this lesson, students continue to choose appropriate representation (MP5) to display categorical and numerical data, reason abstractly and quantitatively (MP2) by interpreting the displays in context, and study and comment on features of data distributions they show. Here they begin to use the everyday meaning of the word “typical” to describe a characteristic of a group. They are also introduced to the idea of using center and spread to describe distributions generally. Planted here are seeds for the idea that values near the center of the distribution can be considered “typical” in some sense. These concepts are explored informally at this stage but will be formalized over time, as students gain more experience in describing distributions and more exposure to different kinds of distributions.