Exploring statistical measures by estimating the ages of famous people

This lesson focuses on developing student understanding of statistical measures. It is a re-working of a workshop I offered for the NZAMT 2009 conference. This lesson is awesome because students drive the development of a measure for determining the best “age estimator”.

I was introduced to the activity when I was at teachers’ college, and have used it in my teaching pretty much every year since then in some way or another. I adapted it to focus on creating a variety of measures (not just the standard deviation) during some early work on the SOLO taxonomy, as a way of demonstrating progressions in thinking.

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