8.6 Associations in Data

In this unit, students generate and work with bivariate data sets that has more variability than in previous units. They learn to understand and use the terms “scatter plot” and “association,” and describe associations as “positive” or “negative” and “linear” or “non-linear.” Students describe scatter plots, using a term previously used to describe univariate data “cluster,” and the new term “outlier.” They fit lines to scatter plots and informally assess their goodness of fit by judging the closeness of the data points to the lines, and compare predicted and actual values. Students learn to understand and use the terms “two-way table,” “bar graph,” and “segmented bar graph,” using two-way tables to investigate categorical data.