AP Statistics Report Writing and the Use of Mentor Texts

My school has been participating in a district-wide program on literacy. This has been going on for a number of years now. One tool which we were shown a few years ago was mentor texts. These are texts that are models of what good writing should look like. Students are able to read through and analyze these text for elements that they should be striving to achieve in their own writing.

In statistics, there are any number of studies available to use for mentor texts. Unfortunately, most of these statistical reports are multiple pages (sometimes 20 or more pages) and are written for graduate and post-graduate-level readers. Definitely not appropriate for high school students.

Since one of my first writing assignments in AP Statistics requires the writing of a newspaper article, I decided to make use of data-driven newspaper articles for mentor texts. I make use of six articles that are brief, contain specific data references and graphs, and provide a decent introduction and conclusion regarding the topic.

I have used mentor texts for the past three years and have found that it helps get students more focused on staying to the facts and referencing explicit statistics. To remind students of what they found in the mentor texts, I post a list or a wordle of their findings.

Below is this year's wordle. As you can see, words such as percentage, data, examples, and charts all are prominent in the display. This puts students on a fast-track to writing better statistical reports.