Statistics: Statistical investigations, Level 2
AO1: Conduct investigations using the statistical enquiry cycle:
This means students will use the statistical enquiry cycle in their investigations.
The cycle has five phases that relate to each other. Some enquiries follow these phases
in sequence but often new considerations mean that a statistician must go back to previous phases and rethink. The phases are:
At Level Two students should be able to pose questions that they want to investigate,
consider the appropriate data they need to collect, gather and sort the data in
order to develop an answer to their question. The data involved may be either
category data or whole number data. Category data arises from classifying and the
interest is in how many of the data items fall in each category (called frequency).
Colour and number of doors are two ways to classify cars that will produce category data.
Whole number data comes from situations where only whole number values are possible, e.g.
how many people live in your house? or from rounding of measures, e.g. how long is your pencil
to the nearest centimetre? The most common graphs for displaying category data are pictographs,
bar, strip and pie graphs. Whole number data can be displayed using dot plots or stem and leaf
graphs. Students should communicate their result through reference to their data displays with an
emphasis on similarity and difference, e.g. boys like outdoor games more than girls..
Click to download a PDF of second-tier material relating to Level 2 Statistical Investigations (584KB)
