Respect for all: Scattergrams

This activity was used with pupils in key stage 4, year 10.

Context

This school is an inner-city comprehensive with 1371 pupils. Seventy-five per cent of pupils are from minority ethnic groups. The school has a strong anti-racism policy that influences the teaching of all subjects.

Aim

• To develop data handling and interpretation and an understanding of how some conditions in life have a causal effect on other conditions.

Activity objectives

• To investigate any causal relationships between the demographic data of the features provided for the activity.
• To raise pupils' awareness that addressing one feature may have a strong effect on a second feature.
• To use skills in handling data.

Activity description

The teacher provided a fact sheet about a range of countries, produced by Amnesty International (UK), including features such as:

• under-fives mortality rate;
• life expectancy;
• secondary education enrolment rate.

The teacher asked the pupils to draw a scattergram showing the correlation between any two features from the fact sheet. Later the pupils were asked if the scattergram they had drawn displayed positive, negative or no correlation. If a correlation was noticed, a line of best fit was drawn.

Commentary

Those pupils who chose to compare features that did not result in correlation seemed less satisfied than those with lines of best fit. However, a very fruitful discussion took place towards the end of the work when pupils were invited to speculate about why positive or negative correlation occurred: was this a causal relationship or just chance? The teacher finished the session with a question left unanswered: 'What would happen if we had data about countries from western Europe?'

Resources

The Maths and Human Rights Resource Book, Amnesty International. This book costs £5 and can be ordered from Amnesty International, 99-119 Rosebery Avenue, London EC1R 4RE. Telephone 01788 545553.

The online national curriculum can be found at www.nc.uk.net/

Mathematics introduction

All subjects and activities

Respect for all introduction

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