In this unit of work designed for students in Years 9 and 10, students examine how they can use the fairly simple statistical technique of plotting two related variables together on a scatterplot and find a ‘line of best fit’, to approximate a linear relationship between two variables.
The activity has students collecting their own information from a well-known Australia car buying website and using this to find an estimated relationship between the ‘asking price’ for a used car and the distance it has traveled in kilometres.
Students then examine the equation that expresses this linear relationship, using both graphical and algebraic information to help analyse and predict expected values.
The resource provides both a Teacher Guide and Student Workbook, as well as some background reading. there is also a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with which to collect data, create a scatterplot graph and generate a linear relationship within the collected data.
Teachers are provided with a background introductory lesson and activity for the whole class, a guide to using and setting up the spreadsheet and a full set of sample worked solutions for the resource, with further enrichment links to material on linear relationships, bivariate data and regression analysis.
This Unit was designed in collaboration with Ms Natalie Hammond from Bayside P-12 College, Victoria.
Reading: Approximate-linear-relationships
Year-9-10-Linear-Task-Teacher-Guide
Year-9-10-Linear-Task-Student-Workbook
