Building an appreciation of distribution enables students to move from examining individual values to studying aggregates, trends and patterns in data. It enables them to progress from a single distribution to comparing distributions, looking for similarities and differences between populations.
Observations could relate to:
- skewness
- symmetry
- overall spread
- outliers
- means
- medians
- clumps and gaps.
These expose the variation in the data and the story it tells about the context of the investigation.