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Survey says? Who says?

Downloadable versions of this activity are available in the following formats:

(RTF format, PDF format)

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Teacher's notes

Answers:

Statement 1 – True: the data can support this.

Statement 2 – False: the data were collected for 12-year-old students, both boys and girls together, not separately for each sex.

Statement 3 – False: the data in the table refer only to 12-year-old students, not to all students of all ages.

Statement 4 – False: the data were collected for the provinces, with no breakdown by city. To support this statement, we would need to know the average height of 12-year-old students in each of the cities mentioned.

Statement 5 – False: data were not collected for every Canadian province and territory, only for the 10 provinces. To support this statement, we would need to know the average height of 12-year-old students in each of the territories as well.

Objectives:

The student should be able to

• identify the limits of student-collected data and published data.
• discuss, interpret and ascribe meaning to the organized data.
• analyse and interpret arguments or conclusions based on statistical information.
• make inferences to generate a conclusion about the data.

Contributed byFlorence Glanfield, University of Saskatchewan.