Lesson 7

The mathematical purpose of this lesson is for students to understand that correlation coefficients describe the relationship between variables and the trend they create on a graph. Previously, students learned about lines of best fit and they distinguished between information given by a linear model and actual data. In the associated Algebra 1 lesson, students find and interpret correlation coefficients. Students make use of structure (MP7) when they think about how scatter plots look when a linear model is a very close fit to the data and when it is not. They reason abstractly and quantitatively (MP2) when they synthesize parts of a linear model and think about how to rank the models based on how likely the data is to lay directly on the line produced from the linear model.