Lesson Plan: You Will Soon Analyze Categorical Data (Classifying Fortune Cookie Fortunes)
Mary Richardson
(Grades 9-12+) Originally published in May 2014, students will have the opportunity to collect and explore real data using two brands of fortune cookies. Students will open each brand of fortune cookie and classify their fortunes into one of four categories. Students will then construct a two-way frequency table to display their data and investigate their results using joint relative frequencies and marginal and conditional distributions. In an extension, students will use a chi-square test of homogeneity to determine if the proportions of fortunes within the categories differ for the two brands.
