Share with your students why the presence of an outlier affects which measure of central tendency to report. Feel free to modify this Powerpoint presentation to fit the needs of your students. Included at the end are additional online resources to further engage your students in their learning about the mean, median, and mode. The presentation is covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
This is a site that contains a number of types of material that can be used in teaching about chance and probability. Lesson plans, syllabi, suggested activities, and data sets are available. The data sets contain interesting information for students such as: quarterback passing rating data, baseball streaks, and baseball salaries that can be used to illustrate means, medians, etc.. The site also contains a link to the Chance News (which is now a wiki on CAUSEweb).
In this module, students can test their knowledge of levels of measurement by attempting to determine the the level of measurement of ten different variables. For each variable, a statement is also provided and students can indicate whether the statement about the variable is valid or invalid (given the way in which the variable was measured). There is also a brief "refresher" included here about levels of measurement.
January 26, 2010 webinar presented by Alicia Gram, Smith College, and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Capital University. This webinar describes an activity that uses data collected from an experiment looking at the relationship between two categorical variables: whether a cotton plant was exposed to spider mites; and did the plant contract Wilt disease? The activity uses randomization to explore whether there is a difference between the occurrence of the disease with and without the mites. The webinar includes a discussion of the learning goals of the activity, followed by an implementation of the activity then suggestions for assessment. The implementation first uses a physical simulation, then a simulation using technology. (Extra materials, including Fathom instructions for the simulation, available for download free of charge).