While this support activity is designed for a face-to-face, synchronous delivery, it should be noted that supporting text and interactive examples have been embedded in the digital assignment page to assist asynchronous or hybrid course delivery and to be made more accessible to students performing make-up work.

Notes for synchronous active-learning delivery

Use this corequisite support activity to prepare students for calculating and interpreting residuals.

Consider opening the class with Questions 1–3. Students might get stuck with starting; be ready to ask students to sketch examples of scatterplots with strong linear trends, weak linear trends, or non-linear trends to get them thinking about what they already know.

Students may need a reminder about how to use the line of best fit to find the predicted value of the response variable.

If your students struggle with subtraction, especially subtraction of negative numbers, feel free to linger on this topic. You may want to focus on integers for this section. Additional ideas for conveying subtraction of negative numbers can be found at https://betterexplained.com/articles/subtracting-negative-numbers/.

The use of a number line on the board might be useful. Once students are comfortable with the traditional number line, you could consider rotating the number line so that it is vertical. Moving this vertical number line along the line of best fit illustrates immediately the value of the residuals for a given point.