Representative Values

A collection of figures gets replaced by a single characteristic. Three kinds are prepared, all as word problems: finding the mean from eight pieces of data each and comparing two groups, finding the mean, the mode and the median from ten pieces of data, and comparing the modes and medians of two groups.

Asked for the mode of two groups combined, children tend to write down one of the two modes found group by group. A combined mode is chosen after adding the counts of the same value across both tables, so it can turn out to be a value different from either one.

What is handled is a row of figures and the three representative values drawn from it. In Frequency Distribution Tables and Histograms the same data is divided into classes and the way it divides is itself examined.