Check understanding

• Sort questions such as 'How tall am I?', 'How tall are the pupils in my class?', 'How many days are in March?' and 'How many hours of sleep do 12-year-olds usually get?' into statistical and non-statistical, explaining each choice by whether the answers are expected to vary
• For a given statistical question, name the population and the attribute being measured, describe the variation they expect (e.g. 'sleep times will differ from person to person, perhaps from 7 to 11 hours'), and explain that a good answer must account for that variability in the data — even a single-number summary such as 'a typical 12-year-old sleeps about 9 hours' stands for many differing values, unlike the one fixed answer to 'How many days are in March?'
• Explain why a question about a group can still be non-statistical (e.g. 'How many pupils are in my class?' has one fixed answer), and rewrite a non-statistical question as a statistical one (e.g. 'How long is my journey to school?' becomes 'How long are journeys to school for pupils in my year?')

“If you ask your child whether 'How many pets does our family have?' and 'How many pets do children in your class have?' are the same kind of question, can they explain that the second one has lots of different answers — so you'd need to collect data from many people — while the first has just one answer?”