← Back to topic
LESSON PLAN
Statistics in Society
A
Apothem Team
Grade 9 · Data & Probability
LESSON AT A GLANCE
Warm-up
5 min
Instruction
15 min
Guided practice
15 min
Independent work
12 min
Exit ticket
3 min
Warm-up
Show a misleading graph (truncated axis) and ask what impression it gives versus what the numbers actually say.
Instruction
Guided practice
Independent work
Exit ticket
Students critique sampling methods and graphs. Exit ticket: name one source of bias in a given study.
TIP Bring real headlines — students engage far more when the misleading statistic is from this week's news.
WORKED EXAMPLES
A website polls its own visitors about internet use. Why is this biased?
The sample only includes people already online — it is not representative of the whole population.
A graph's vertical axis starts at 90 instead of 0. What is the effect?
Small differences look huge; the truncated axis exaggerates the change.
MATERIALS
•Newspaper or online graphs
•Sample survey questions
•Calculators
•Board or projector
WATCH FOR
!Believing a large sample is automatically unbiased.
!Trusting a graph without checking its axes and scale.