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The Teaching Quantitative Skills in the Geosciences website has not been significantly updated since 2011. We are preserving the web pages here because they still contain useful ideas and content. But be aware that the site may have out of date information.
You can find more recent and extensive resources on the Teach the Earth website.

Estimating Slopes

Many suggest that students should first learn how to estimate the slope of a graph by hand before using a least squares linear regression routine. Students must first draw a straight line through their data that represents the linear trend of the data. They may want to draw three lines for: the best guess; the largest slope; and the smallest slope consistent with the data.

SlopeEstimateGraph

The links below provides basic guidelines for estimating the slope of a line.

  • Slope of a Straight Line is from Purple Math. This site is intended as an algebra review/tutorial but it is useful in that it has interactive practice examples for students to test their understanding.