Graphing Can You Have it All?
This activity student will provide students the opportunity to collect data and critically think about what
is the best type of display for this type of data.
Goals:
• Collect data
• Organize data
• Display data with appropriate notation in tables
• Select the appropriate type of chart or graph to display the data
• Construct the appropriate charts or graphs for the data
Materials:
• Activity Handout: “Can You Have It All?”
• Graph paper
Background:
Students need to understand what each type of chart or graph is and what type of data is best displayed
by that type of graph.
Chart or Graph type
• Frequency tables
The frequency of a particular observation is the number of times the observation occurs in
the data. Frequency distribution tables can be used for both categorical and numeric
variables. Best used when you want to know how many time one chose was selected.
• Scatter plots
Scatter plots are similar to line graphs in that they use horizontal and vertical axes to plot
data points. Scatter plots show how much one variable is affected by another. The
relationship between two variables is called their correlation. Scatter plots are best used
when you want to know how one variable affected the other variable.
• Broken line graphs
A broken line graph would be discontinuous-- the entire line would not be connected, there
would be a space between two or more of the points. Best used when there is not continuous
data.
• Line plots
A graph of ordered pairs, (x,y), where the points are connected, in order, by a line segment.
Best used when the data shows a change over time.
• Bar graphs
A bar graph is a visual display used to compare the amounts or frequency of occurrence of
different characteristics of data. Best used to:
compare groups of data, and
to make generalizations about the data quickly
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