It’s that time of the year when your classes have probably finished their end of year exams, and you are looking for something a bit different to do to help you (and your students!) get to the end of term in one piece. Often, according to the scheme of work, this is the time of year to take on a data handling project. Now, I have experimented with several different ones over the last few years, but this time I wanted to try something new.

Step forward Dan Clark, with this simple, but highly engaging and effective idea. Students have to work together in groups to decide what characteristics the average student has. The beauty of this is your students have the freedom to choose their own categories, put together their own questionnaires, collect the data and then produce a poster of their findings. I have found that having ownership over the data is absolutely crucial for students’ engagement, and my class certainly responded well to project.

Dan has put together some extra teacher notes and examples of his students’ work on his excellent blog here

Two more weeks of term to go!

Download The Average Student

Check out Dan Clark’s other maths resources