Rich Learning Tasks

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Brothers

Questions to facilitate the learning

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What does each picture you put in your graph represent?

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What makes a graph a good way to show information?

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Why might it make sense to have a category called ‘more brothers’ after 5 brothers?

Scaffolding the learning

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Suppose we put a picture here [put a picture above 0 brothers]. What would that mean?

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Suppose more people had 0 brothers than 2 brothers. How would that show up in the graph?

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How many pictures should we use in our graph? Why?

What’s the point of this task?

When presented with data, whether in table form or visually, students should always question it and

consider whether or not it makes sense. This requires them to think about the type of information being

displayed and what they already know about the situation being described.

Most children will realise, through life experience, that it is possible to have lots and lots of brothers, but

not many people would have more than, for example, 3 or 4 brothers and most people would have either

0, 1 or 2 brothers.

Students are asked to create a graph rather than a table to reinforce the value of visual displays. Using

pictures as elements of the graph makes the graph more meaningful to young students than simply using

rectangles as we do with bar graphs. Asking students to create the graph rather than choosing from some

possible graphs puts more of the onus on the students to do the thinking.

Many students mistakenly believe that the pictures in the graph represent the brothers, but actually

the pictures represent the individual children who are surveyed, not the brothers. That means the total

number of pictures should represent the total number of students in the class (possibly with the interviewer

student missing). One indication of misunderstanding of what the icons represent might be (although not

necessarily) that the student uses only boy icons in the graph.

It might be interesting to follow up by allowing students to survey their classmates to see how realistic their

graphs actually are.

Extending the learning

Students imagine and describe or create a graph that shows how many books each student in the class

has read in the past week.

Data