Middle Grades Math: Boxplots Introduction

Objectives

• Students will describe the overall pattern of a distribution by its shape, center, and spread.
• Students will recognize and identify properties of distributions such as symmetry, skewness, and bimodality from boxplots.
• Students will identify outliers.
• Students will recognize that moving data past a quartile can affect that quartile’s value.
• Students will reason abstractly and quantitatively.

Vocabulary

• boxplot
• interquartile range, IQR
• outlier
• skewness
• interval
• range
• symmetry
• distribution
• median
• quartile

About the Lesson

This lesson involves representing distributions of data using boxplots.

As a result, students will:

• Develop the reasoning skills to recognize properties of a distribution from its boxplot.
• Understand the relationship between individual data values and the five-number summary.
• Move data within a dot plot and observe the changes within the corresponding boxplot to identify particular characteristics that most directly affect the five-number summary.