Let your student study American Idol viewing figures over the last eleven seasons. Students compare historical season premier and season finale audience size in several different ways to determine which event has had higher viewership. They consider outliers and judge the reliability of the mean and median. Finally, students plot data in order to predict future viewership and make season twelve predictions. Which has been more popular, the premiere or finale?
Season twelve premiered on January 16th and the finale will be on May 23rd. This activity will be timely for a while. Enjoy!
This activity should be accessible to students as young as 4th grade. This is one of the few real life math activities that we have seen in which students create box plots (box and whisker plots). Students use box plots to analyze the premiere and finale data. They can make their plots by hand or use technology at Interactivate's Free Box Plot Application.
For members we have an editable Word doc, an Excel data and graph file, and solutions.
season12-idol.doc idol12.xls season12-idol-solutions.pdf
CCSS: 6.SP.2, 6.SP.3, 6.SP.4, 6.SP.5, 7.SP.3, 7.SP.4