Course Guide - USAID Teacher Education Project

Usually, when looking at a line plot or bar graph, the mode would be seen as thetallest "stack" in a line plot or the tallest bar in a bar graph. This does not mean thatthe mode has the highest value in a data set, only that it occurs most frequently.For example, if children among several families have the ages 5, 9, 6, 1, 4, 6, 7, 6, 3,the mode of their ages is 6 years old because that is the number that occurs threetimes, even though the oldest child is 9. If the data were put into numerical order on aline plot it would show 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 6, 7, 9 with 6 having the highest frequency (or"stack" of "x's").e) There can be more than one mode. This type of distribution would be termed bimodal,as in the following case where the greatest number (330) appears twice (in1999 and 2000), while the other values appear only once.f) The median is the number halfway between the minimum and maximum numberslisted in an ordered data set. Thus, in the data set above (about children's ages) thereare nine numbers. When ages are organized from youngest to oldest (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6,6, 7, 9), the median would be 6 because half the data (four values) are to the left of thehighlighted 6, whereas the other four values are to the right of that 6.g) Note that in the data set about children's ages there was an odd number of values,which allowed for finding the median by counting off an equal number of values tothe right and to the left. However, the median in a data set with an even number ofvalues might not be a number in the data set. It might not even be an integer.2. How do children think about these concepts?a) When youngsters create frequency tables for categorical data used to create a tallycharts, bar graphs, or pictographs, they do not need to design their table in ascendingor descending order.