When teaching Year 8 students about how to choose the right way to show data, it's important to know which type of graph works best for continuous data.

What is Continuous Data?
Continuous data is information that can take any value within a certain range.

Some common examples include:

• Height
• Weight
• Temperature
• Time

Here are some helpful types of graphs for showing continuous data:

1. Line Graphs:

   • Best For: Showing changes over time.
   • Advantages: Easy to spot patterns, trends, and changes up or down.
   • Example: A line graph can show how temperatures change during a week by marking daily highs and lows.

2. Scatter Plots:

   • Best For: Showing how two different things are related.
   • Advantages: Good for finding connections (like positive or negative relationships) and seeing how strong those connections are.
   • Example: A scatter plot could show the link between the number of hours studied and the scores on an exam.

3. Histograms:

   • Best For: Showing how continuous data is spread out by putting values into groups.
   • Advantages: Helps us see how often certain values happen and can show the most common values.
   • Example: A histogram can show the heights of students in a class.

4. Box Plots:

   • Best For: Summarizing a lot of data and showing important points like the middle value and any unusual values.
   • Advantages: Helps us see how data is spread out and lets us compare between different groups.
   • Example: A box plot could show the test scores of students in different subjects.

In summary, when Year 8 students need to pick a graph for continuous data, they should think about what they want to show. Use line graphs for trends, scatter plots for relationships, histograms for distributions, and box plots for summarizing data. Learning these differences will help students better understand and work with data!