I wanted to make sure my students were confident at deciding which piece of data they'd be searching for when finding the median from a table.
This slide is where they are first exposed to the idea of (n+1)/2 as a tool for finding the location of the median. We did plenty of work on the whiteboard until they were feeling confident with this tool and then they attempted the following task:
My students were fine with identifying what piece of data they were looking for but there was some confusion with which category that piece of data was in. They were happy if the median was one of the values in the 'running total' but were confused if not.
To combat this I have made this task. It starts with really simple numbers and listing every piece of data to frequency tables with large frequencies where the students will be expected to write the range of pieces of data instead of each individual position.
The task also offers opportunities to work backwards to ensure they understand what it means when they write down the positions.
For all of these tasks find the downloadable file here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qdjSBwpR-3N_Wd86AyXhYSBCAwWNPESu/view?usp=sharing