Data Analysis for High School Teachers

First Meeting, January 7, 2000

I. Getting to Know You, or How I Became a Statistician

II. Lecture: What do Statisticians Really Do?

Sorry. But there's no avoiding a lecture on the first day.

III. Practice: Describing Data

From Problem Solving: A Statistician's Guide, Christopher Chatfield, Chapman and Hall.

1. Summarize the following sets of data in whatever way you think is appropriate.

a) The marks (out of 100 and ordered by size) of 20 students in a mathematics exam:

30,35,37,40,40,49,51,54,54,55,57,58,60,60,62,62,65,67,74,89

b) The number of days work missed by 20 workers in one year (ordered by size):

0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1

2,2,3,3,4,5,5,5,8,45

c) The number of issues of a particular monthly magazine read by 20 people in a year:

0,1,11,0,0,0,2,12,0,0

12,1,0,0,0,0,12,0,11,0

d) The height in meters of 20 women who are being investigated for a certain medical conditions:

1.52, 1.60, 1.57, 1.52, 1.60, 1.75, 1.73, 1.63, 1.55, 1.63

1.65, 1.55, 1.65, 1.60, 1.68, 2.50, 1.52, 1.65, 1.60, 1.65

2. The data given below show the (scaled) concentration of a certain chemical in 10 cut shoots of broad bean plants and in 10 rooted plants.

Cut shoots: 53 58 48 18 55 42 50 47 51 45

Rooted plants: 36 33 40 43 25 38 41 46 34 29

Summarize the data in whatever way you think is appropriate. From a visual insepction of the data, do you think there is a significant difference between the two sample means? Carry out a formal test of significance to see if the observed difference in sample means is significantly different from zero at the 1% level. Do any other questions occur to you?

IV. "Homework" for discussion next week

From Applied Statistics: Principles and Examples, Cox, D.R., Snell, E.J., Chapman and Hall.

See Handout.