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.

Suggested instructional plan for synchronous active-learning

Use this corequisite support activity as a way to gauge students’ abilities to calculate the mean and median of a dataset both by hand and using technology. Even though students have been calculating these quantities using technology before this point, calculating them by hand may make it easier for students to see the effect of changing one or more data values on the mean and median. Students will need to understand the computations behind these measures of center in upcoming preview assignments and in-class activities, and they will need to be able to use technology to do so in upcoming practice assignments.

Students will be asked to verify their computations using the Describing and Exploring Quantitative Variables tool at https://dcmathpathways.shinyapps.io/EDA_quantitative/.

Consider having students approach this task in small groups. If students don’t have access to computers or phones, consider convening the class briefly to demonstrate the use of technology on the overhead mid-class. As you get into computation of the median by hand, students may be confused when there appears to be no “middle” value of the dataset (since the dataset has an even number of observations). Help them to see that they must find the mean of the innermost values and prompt them to think about why we can consider this to be the “middle” value.

Students may struggle interpreting the median and the mean. Consider giving smaller examples with values that are easier to compute and demonstrate visually how we find the median.

Note that, for asynchronous or hybrid delivery, or for those working alone, students are provided just-in-time refreshers for how to calculate the median of an even-numbered set of values in the digital text as well as how to calculate mean and define both.