Poetry Month Data Project: Comparing Readability (Lester)
Data Story
In this lesson, students will analyze a poem of their choosing to determine the poem's readability and will give their poem a readability score of highly readable, average, or difficult. Readability will be determined by comparing the mean word length of the poem to the mean word length of all words in the English language. Students will then compare the readability of their poem to another poem from a Tuva dataset using parallel dot and box plots. Students will be able to: Determine the readability of their poem using the mean word length. Compare the readability of their poem to another poem using parallel dot and box plots.
April is Poetry Month and Mathematics and Statistical Awareness Month! In this activity we will celebrate both by using your class' poem Lester by Shel Silverstein in the form of a dataset. Your investigative question for this lesson is: How readable is the poem our class chose? > In order to answer this question, you will analyze the word length of each word in the poem.
Topics and standards: Data Distributions