Iowa Core Mathematics
Sense-Making Activities
Description and Correlation
Title: Highcrest High School Survey
Grade: 9-12
Iowa Core
Characteristics of
Effective Instruction
Iowa Core Standards
for Mathematical
Practice
Iowa Core Standards
for Mathematical
Content:
Grades K-8
Domain/Standards
Grades 9-12
Conceptual Category/
Domain/Standards
Sense-Making Activity

Teaching for Understanding


Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
S-CP-4: Construct and interpret two-way frequency tables of data when
two categories are associated with each object being classified. Use
the two-way table as a sample space to decide if events are
independent and to approximate conditional probabilities. For
example, collect data from a random sample of students in your
school on their favorite subject among math, science, and English.
Estimate the probability that a randomly selected student from your
school will favor science given that the student is in tenth grade. Do
the same for other subjects and compare the results.
The diagram below shows the results of a two-question survey administered
to 80 randomly selected students at Highcrest High School.
• Of the 2100 students in the school, how many would you expect to play a
musical instrument?
• Estimate the probability that an arbitrary student at the school plays on a
sports team and plays a musical instrument. How is this related to
estimates of the separate probabilities that a student plays a musical
instrument and that he or she plays on a sports team?
• Estimate the probability that a student who plays on a sports team also
plays a musical instrument.
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Highcrest High School Survey
Do you play on a sports
team?
Do you play a musical
instrument?
Yes
No
Yes
14
32
No
20
14
(From NCTM’s Principles and Standards for School Mathematics, p. 331)
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