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Overrated

How much should you trust online ratings?

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Overrated

How much should you trust online ratings?

Login to add lessons to your favorites
Log In or Sign Up to Access Lesson Materials
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How much should you trust online ratings? When you’re shopping for items online, it can be hard to know which to buy. Star ratings are a helpful way to quickly compare products, but they can also be misleading.

In this lesson, students use mean, median, and mode to analyze the trustworthiness of 5-star ratings system and suggest ways to make them more reliable.

REAL WORLD TAKEAWAYS

  • When there is a small number of reviews the next review has a bigger impact on the mean than with larger numbers.
  • Plenty of online reviews are fake.
  • More reviews might be better to rely on than a small number.

MATH OBJECTIVES

  • Calculate mean, median, and mode and compare the appropriateness in context

Appropriate most times as students are developing conceptual understanding.
Grade 6
Data & Distributions
Grade 6
Data & Distributions
Content Standards 6.SP.3 Recognize that a measure of center for a numerical data set summarizes all of its values with a single number, while a measure of variation describes how its values vary with a single number. 6.SP.5 Summarize numerical data sets in relation to their context, such as by: (a) Reporting the number of observations. (b) Describing the nature of the attribute under investigation, including how it was measured and its units of measurement. (c) Giving quantitative measures of center (median and/or mean) and variability (interquartile range and/or mean absolute deviation), as well as describing any overall pattern and any striking deviations from the overall pattern with reference to the context in which the data were gathered. (d) Relating the choice of measures of center and variability to the shape of the data distribution and the context in which the data were gathered.
Mathematical Practices MP.3 Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others. MP.6 Attend to precision.

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