Maybe it's because middle school CCSS ELA standards require research that might put students in a position where they need to understand statistics.
That's my guess.
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Marty G
3/16/2014 10:02:39 am
I now approach this statistics as ways of describing sets. We have lots of ways of describing sets that are very fancy (read: beyond the scope of your class), but MAD is a good intro one. Plus, its a great exercise in parsing the name, as it describes exactly what needs to be done.
It ends up not being important because the MAD is important, but more that it is an opportunity to stretch our mathematical muscles in a new way.
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Julie
3/16/2014 12:02:06 pm
I like explaining and showing the students what this is. However, I usually don't have them calculate it as it is rather laborious, even with a calculator. I have found the interquartile range to be more useful for 6th grade than the absolute mean deviation. It is also easier to calculate.
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Chris Brownell
3/17/2014 06:03:15 am
It is a relatively simple to understand introduction to a measure of spread of a data set. A shift in focus to dealing with data in meaningful ways is underway in the math curriculum. I think including this at that the level you are teaching is just that.
What will be difficult to accomplish, I think, will be to focus on that meaning, and off the calculation. This measure says "something" about how spread out the set is. Perhaps not a lot, but it does say something and can be useful in stimulating more questions in the students minds about what is actually going on in the data.