Lesson Portfolio Entry Template

Instructional Support What tools or resources will students have to use in their work that will give them entry to, and help them reason through, the activity? Task What is the main activity that students will be working on in this lesson?
Comparing Cars: Standard Deviation discovery and Mean comparisons. Students will discover what standard deviation is while looking at fuel efficient car data and then choose which estimate is best based on the mean and standard deviation. Students will have access to: Calculators Previous notes Other students Me Scrap paper Text book

Learning Goals (Residue) What understandings will students take away from this activity?
Students will take away: a process for standard deviation A definition/meaning for standard deviation A comparison between mean and standard deviation A real world application for the mean and standard deviation Problem solving techniques

What questions might you ask students that will support their exploration of the activity and bridge between what they did and what you want them to learn (the two green boxes)?
To be clear on what students actually did, begin by asking a set of assessing questions such as: What did you do? How did you get that? What does this mean? Once you have a clearer sense of what the student understands, move on to appropriate set of questions below.

What are the various ways that students might complete the activity? Students may choose to complete each table by hand or with use of their calculator. Students who know how to do it in their calculator may choose to compute it that way not super likely yet. Students may break up the work

S: What does this number mean? (points to a standard deviation) T: Well lets back up. What do the values in the chart represent? S: Thats how far the data is away from the mean, Thats those values squared, T: Why might we square them? S: What does the mean have to do with standard deviation? T: Look at how we calculated it. We used the mean. How did we use it? S: Why do we square root it at the end? T: Why might we have squared the values in the first place? S: Two of the cars have the same fuel efficiency

Evidence What will students say, do, produce, etc. that will provide evidence of their understandings? Students will complete the charts and calculations and provide thoughtful responses to follow up questions. During discussion students will participate and ask questions to students presenting their work

Lesson Portfolio Entry Template

amount their pair. After computing the values students may choose to look at all of the cars or assess only two of them. They may come to conclusions based on some or all of the data.
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so can I just choose both? T: What might the standard deviation tell us about the two cars? S: So the smaller the standard deviation the better? T: Whats better? S: Does it mean the data is better? T: You are on the right track.

leading to thoughtful discussion about the task Students will have correctly selected the most fuel efficient car correctly and be able to describe their work