Tag Archives: averages

Select the England Ashes Cricket Team- An Averages Investigation

Posted on by William Emeny
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England cricket team

England cricket team (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A deputy head at my school is trying is hand at teaching some maths this year after a career teaching PE. He’s doing an excellent job and recently came up with a great lesson idea and resource for an averages lesson.

Click here to download the resource (Microsoft Word)

The idea is that small groups of pupils are selectors for the England cricket team. They need to choose the best batsmen to take to the next Ashes series. They look at four batsmen’s scores over the last season and calculate the averages and range for each one. They then have to use these to justify their final team selection. This is a nice way into looking at strengths and weaknesses of different types of average as it provides a contextual setting to do so.

He reported that his pupils loved the activity and has been kind enough to let me share it with you. Enjoy!

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Who is the best England batsman? An investigation using the mean, median, mode and range

Posted on by William Emeny
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Cricket isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but this lesson idea hasn’t failed to motivate any class that I have tried it on.

The idea is simple- look at the real world batting scores of England batsmen and use the mean, median, mode and range to decide who is the ‘best’ batsman. Each group of pupils are given these worksheets which list the scores, explains the task and also contain pictures that they might like to stick on a poster next to their statistical analysis and interpretive reasoning.

The pupils should be encouraged to decide what ‘best batsman’ actually means to them. They could take many views, for example, do you take the person with the highest score as being the best, but if they have the biggest range could you say they were inconsistent? Kevin Pietersen has a high median but a low mean i.e. he either scores big or not at all; does this make him better or worse than the others who have a higher mean? There are lots of different justifications the pupils could use and the task promotes interpretation and the drawing of conclusions based on justifying using the stats.

A nice plenary is to get each group to present their poster to the class explaining their decision of who is the best batsman and why.

Enjoy! Let us know how this lesson goes for you if you use it!