Well, it turns out that I still have posts in my drafts folder from last year. I guess I should do something about that.

The Skill: Comparing Data Sets
The Topic: Ages of Academy Award Winners
The Introduction: Ask students what they expect to happen. This was a difficult task for my students. It turns out they didn’t really have a good idea of which actors/actresses have ever won an Academy Award for Best Performance. They were convinced that Betty White had won the Oscar for Best Performance…
The Data: Ages of Winners Divided by Gender
The Data Display: Back-to-Back Stem-and-Leaf Plot
Note to self: Give students a graph paper grid to do this on top of in the future. Their data displays were a MESS.
The Conclusion: Analyze Similarities/Differences and Answer Reflection Questions
Of all the activities we did in our data analysis unit last year, this one was probably one of my least favorites. It’s not that the activity was bad.
It just didn’t have the enjoyment factor that our other activities had of collecting our own data. So, I’ll probably be on the lookout for a different activity for creating back-to-back stem-and-leaf plots for this year.
It was really interesting to listen to students share their theories regarding this data, though!
Free Download of Age of Academy Award Winners Foldable
Age of Academy Award Winners (PDF) (449 downloads)
Age of Academy Award Winners (Editable Publisher File ZIP) (431 downloads)
More Ideas for Teaching Quantitative Data Displays
- Tenzi Data Collection Activity for Comparing Data Sets
- Dot Plot of the Day Activity
- Design Your Own Dot Plot Magnets Activity
- How Many States Have You Visited Map
- Dotplot Matching – A Desmos Card Sort Activity for Statistics
- Count the Objects Task for Data Collection
- Analyzing the Ages of Academy Award Winners
- Are your graphs OK? TULSA Graphing Posters
- Highlights Hidden Pictures Activity for Comparing Data Sets
- Blind Stork Test for Data Collection
- Dry Erase Workmat for Finding Five Number Summary, IQR, and Outliers
- Estimating 30 Seconds Data Collection Activity
- Types of Data Displays Foldable
- Kentucky Derby Winning Times
Stacie
Friday 27th of October 2017
I was planning something similar but using the ages of my students' parents. I wonder if this would create authentic data with a gender gap?