This is a comprehensive lesson plan to teach 9-10 grade students about making  inferences and gives them practical practice. It also includes formative and summative assessments. Preview image is "thinking cap" by Joe in DC

Learn how to make inferences in literature, nonfiction and real life, and to support those inferences with strong, reliable evidence.Preview Image is "thinking cap" by Joe in DC

The basic idea of this task is for students to demonstrate that they know what it means for two variables to be associated.

In this task students design a plan to conduct a random sample of the students in their school to estimate the proportion of students who think their parents are strict.

Animal shelters euthanize animals when no one adopts them. According to Joyce, the narrator of this segment, 26,000 dogs a year are picked up by Albuquerque Animal Services. To help find homes for the unwanted pets, Joyce, who is also a photographer, takes pictures of the dogs and posts the pictures on the Internet. She hopes when people see the dogs on the Internet they have an added incentive to come to the shelter to take them home. In this video segment from WILD TV, learn more about Joyce and her efforts to find homes for unwanted pets in Albuquerque. For more about animal shelters, see video segment "Animal Shelter".

This exercise demonstrates that judgment (non-random) samples tend to be biased in the sense that they produce samples that are not balanced with respect to the population characteristics of interest.