Descriptive Statistics

Summary :

This chapter teaches how to organize and present a data collection, using real classroom examples such as exam scores from a precalculus class and a basketball team's game scores. It covers graphical displays including stem-and-leaf plots, histograms, and box plots, along with measures of location, center, and spread.

Organizing raw data into graphs

Once a collection of data has been gathered, the chapter teaches students to display it graphically and interpret several standard chart types, including stem-and-leaf plots, line graphs, bar graphs, frequency polygons, time series graphs, histograms, box plots, and dot plots, using real classroom examples such as a precalculus class's exam scores.

Measures of location

The chapter covers measures of location, quartiles and percentiles, which describe where a particular value sits within an ordered data set, giving students a way to describe an individual score, such as a basketball team's game total, relative to the rest of the data set rather than in isolation.

Measures of center and spread

Beyond location, the chapter covers the measures of center, mean, median, and mode, and the measures of spread, variance, standard deviation, and range, teaching students to recognize, describe, and calculate each one so that a data set can be summarized by both its typical value and how much its values vary.