In this fun and highly engaging project, students will explore what it means to be a surveyor through creating a question, conducting a survey, gathering data, analyzing the data, and representing data in a variety of graphs for others to interpret. They will gain a deep conceptual understanding of what data is and how it can be purposefully used within the context of a meaningful real world setting. They will work in collaborative partners first and more than likely, they will want to venture off and create their own survey question and conduct their own personal survey. Following the in class partner activity, it can be assigned for homework. The students truly enjoy having ownership of their ideas. This project based activity also integrates technology!

The project components can be used flexibly. You can ask students to complete student pages 1-7 to build mathematical concepts. You can extend the project into writing where they will reflect and synthesize their findings found on student page 8-9. You can ask them to create a persuasive opinion piece or letter that includes authentic data to support their argument or claim. You can have them create a final display for Open House, Memory Box, or Bulletin Board to be shared with others as found on page 10. You can ask students to create questions for other students to answer using the question stems found on page 11. Lastly, you can extend the project to meet Listening and Speaking Standards by having students present their findings.
Standards in this unit include:

CCSS.Math.Content.2.MD.D.10
Draw a picture graph and a bar graph (with single-unit scale) to represent a data set with up to four categories. Solve simple put-together, take-apart, and compare problems1 using information presented in a bar graph.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.2.1
Write opinion pieces in which they introduce the topic or book they are writing about, state an opinion, supply reasons that support the opinion, use linking words (e.g., because, and, also) to connect opinion and reasons, and provide a concluding statement or section.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.2.5
Create audio recordings of stories or poems; add drawings or other visual displays to stories or recounts of experiences when appropriate to clarify ideas, thoughts, and feelings.

Mathematical Practices:

Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
Construct viable arguments
Model with mathematics.
Use appropriate tools strategically.
Attend to precision.
Look for and make use of structure.
Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.