How much should you trust online ratings? When you’re shopping for items online, it can be hard to know which to buy. Star ratings are a helpful way to quickly compare products, but they can also be misleading.
In this lesson, students use mean, median, and mode to analyze the trustworthiness of 5-star ratings system and suggest ways to make them more reliable.
Students will
Calculate mean, median, and mode and compare the appropriateness in context
Before you begin
If students are first learning about mean, median, and mode in the context of this lesson, you may want to add some time for some direct instruction into Q1.
Should shoe companies sell left and right shoes separately? Students collect survey and measurement data, construct bar graphs, and discuss distributions and measures of central tendency in order to figure out whether shoe companies should necessarily be selling their products in same-size pairs.
How should grades be calculated? Students use averages and weighted means to examine some different grading schemes and decide what other factors ought to be considered when teachers assign grades.
What does a fair wealth distribution look like? Students use mean, median, histograms, and box-and-whisker plots to compare how wealth is distributed in different countries and debate the pros and cons of their ideal distribution.
Topic:
Statistics and Probability (SP)
Sign In
Like the jacket, this lesson is for Members only.
Mathalicious lessons provide teachers with an opportunity to teach standards-based math through real-world topics that students care about.
How have video game consoles changed over time? Students create exponential models to predict the speed of video game processors over time, compare their predictions to observed speeds, and consider the consequences as digital simulations become increasingly lifelike.
Topic:
Building Functions (BF), Interpreting Categorical and Quantitative Data (ID), Interpreting Functions (IF), Linear, Quadratic, and Exponential Models (LE), Seeing Structure in Expressions (SSE)