Rich Learning Tasks

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What is this About?
Questions to facilitate the learning
• Why did you decide that this bar [pointing to the higher bar] should be higher?
• Did you conclude that it could have been about your class? What made you think that?
• You concluded that the information is about 22 people—can you be sure of that?
• Can you think of another story that this graph might be about?
• Why are titles and labels important on graphs?
Scaffolding the learning
• You have already seen some graphs. What were they about?
• Suppose the graph were about pets. What might the labels at the bottom be? Who do you think might
have been asked?
• Suppose the graph were about food. What might the labels at the bottom be? Who do you think might
have been asked?
What’s the point of this task?
Usually we provide a topic and ask students to build a graph to provide information about that topic. In
this more open-ended activity, the student looks at pre-collected data and realises it could realistically
apply to many different situations. Becoming aware of this helps students realise why titles and category
names are so important—without them, there is no way to know what the graph is about.
At the earliest levels, students tend to only ‘read’ graphs, generally listing the frequency of each category.
But it is important to get them to draw conclusions and make inferences as well. Because students are
required to tell four things about the graph rather than only two, they must go beyond just reading the
information. One of the things they might draw conclusions about is the number of participants in the
survey—this is tricky if the categories allow for overlap, but if they do not allow for overlap, it is clear.
The bars were made deliberately quite different in height so that students would draw on their life
experience to realise some categories would make more sense than others. For example, if the topic were
about who had brothers vs. who had sisters, you might anticipate a more even split, even though it is
never certain. A total of 22 entries were used so students might find it reasonable to relate the graph to
surveying a class of children at school.
Extending the learning
Students might imagine a graph with three categories, two very close in size and one with a much higher
frequency. They could create the graph and speculate about a reasonable title and labels.
Data