Primary Mathematics Capitalising on ICT for Today and Tomorrow

• be able to choose suitable questions for investigation for children of different ages

• understand the importance of variation in data and different types of variable

• understand the difference between a population and a sample

• recognise different ways of displaying data to ‘tell a story’

• understand the importance of drawing inferences from data, and the uncertainty associated with these inferences

• be able to draw on technology to support the development of statistical understanding.

• Column or bar graph: A way of displaying categorical data using vertical columns or horizontal bars and frequency counts

• Data: Information collected in a systematic way

• Distribution: The look or shape of the data when displayed systematically on an axis

• Interquartile range: Contains the ‘middle half’ of the data set

• Mean: A balancing point that provides a summary of the data

• Median: The middle value of an ordered set of data

• Mode: The most frequently occurring value

• Pictograph: A column graph that uses pictures or symbols to show the data

• Pie chart: A sector graph based on a circle, with each sector in proportion to the percentage of the whole

• Population: The entire group of interest – for example, all Year 3 students in the school

• Range: A measure of the spread of the data

• Sample: A sub-group of the population, often intended to be representative of the whole group – for example, Ms Pitt's Year 3 class is a sample of the population of Year 3 children in the school

• Scootle: An online repository of digital resources for Australian teachers

• Standard deviation: A measure of the variability or spread of a set of data

• Stem-and-leaf plot: A display based on splitting each data value into a ‘stem’ and ‘leaves’ – particularly useful for comparing two groups on the same attribute

• Variation: The concept that underpins statistics.