Links for teachers: Dot plots
Explore Teaching data Stage 3: Dot plots, a Mathematics resource from NSW syllabuses for the Australian curriculum to build teacher capacity in the new syllabus.
Explore What is a dot plot? at Stat Trek. View the video, read the page content and test your understanding.
The Winning dots (NZ) web page (see link also on main page) includes a lesson plan to accompany the PDF student activity sheet.
Dot plots and Stem-and-leaf plots: 4.5 gives strategies to teach dot plots and shows examples of good and poor dot plots.
Lesson 1.1 Bar graphs and dot plots (.pdf 230kB) is a simple two-page lesson worksheet for students.
Data analysis: Graphing (.pdf 318kB) consists of a series of lesson plans and student worksheets. Grade 4-5 Activity focuses on creating and analysing tallies, pictograms, dot-plots,bar graphs and pie charts (Note:This resource uses the term bar graphs for what NESA currriculum call column graphs so some learning activities might need to be modified).
In addition to the great worked example by Adam Gonzalez (see link on the main page), here are two more YouTube dot plot demonstrations (albeit each with drawbacks as indicated).
Create a dot plot — uses a data set of student heights in inches.
Dotplot — Khan Academy video- Sal solves practice problems where he thinks about which data displays would be helpful in which situations.
Create a dot plot in Excel shows how you can create a vertical and horizontal dot plot in Microsoft Excel. There is a downloadable example.
Sites2See: Spreadsheets for mathematics is a page with example resources, exemplars and advice to help integrate spreadsheet use in teaching and learning for mathematics. It includes a link to Tools4U: Microsoft Excel, which can help you get started in Excel.