Introduction

In this 2-day activity the teacher will guide you through the review of several key statistics skills that you learned in Math 1 and teach you new descriptive statistic skills. There are many statistics that we evaluate throughout our lives to make important decisions. Some of these decisions include: what should we study in college, what career should we pursue, where should we live, and even, what should we eat? This activity will help you discover ways that you can analyzed statistics that you are exposed to on a regular basis so that you can make better informed decisions.

Task

Day 1
This activity is centered around a professional basketball theme that requires students to calculate mean, median, and range and compare wins from all of the NBA franchises individually and by division. Interquartile range that you covered briefly in Math 1 will also be reintroduced. You will be asked to calculate mean, median, mode, range and interquartile range from the NBA scores that are provided on the worksheet.

Remember:

Mean is the average of the numbers in a data set. Take all the numbers in the set add them and divide the sum by the number of numbers that you have in your data set.

Median is easy to remember by thinking of the grassy area that divides both sides of the interstate. The median is the middle number. To find the middle number you must always put your set of numbers in order from least to greatest and then mark off numbers at both tails until you get to the middle. If there are two middle numbers after you have done the mark off step then you must average those two numbers to find the median. There will always be two middle numbers when you have an even number of data points in a set and there will always be one middle number when there is an odd number of data points in a set.

Mode is the number that appears the most. It is possible to have two modes or two numbers that appear exactly the same amount of times in a data set. If more than two numbers appear the same amount of times then the data is said to have "no mode".

Range is the greatest number minus the smallest number. It is the measure of the dispersion of the data set.

Interquartile Range is the dispersion of the data set between quartile one(Q1) and quartile three(Q3). To calculate interquartile range you must do the following steps.

1. First, find the median or middle of the data set.

2. Once you find the median of the entire set you must identify the lower and upper quartile.

3. Now that you have identified your quartiles you need to find the median of the upper and the lower quartiles. The median of the upper quartile will be called Q3, while the median of the lower quartile will be called Q3.

4. Finally, to find the interquartile range you must subtract Q1 from Q3.

Day 2
This activity is again centered around a professional basketball theme that introduces students to the calculations involved in finding the standard deviation in a set of data. Standard deviation describes variability in the spread of data about the mean. This activity uses a table structure to organize the multiple operations in the standard deviation formula. The steps below explain how to find the standard deviation using the table method.

1. In the first column record all data points from greatest to least going down.

2. In the second column you are going to subtract the mean of the data set from each data point.

3. The third column is where you will write down the absolute value of each calculation from column two.

4. You will square each number from column 3 and record your answers in the final column.

5. Take the sum of the 4th column.

6. The final step in finding the standard deviation is to take the sum of the 4th column and squareroot it.

Process

Day 1
Complete this Day 1 worksheet by calculating the mean, median, mode, range, and interquartile range and answering the questions that ask you to compare and make an informed decision about some NBA teams and conferences. You will enter your answers in a web-based form for grading.

Day 2
Complete this Day 2 worksheet that practices calculating the standard deviation of multiple professional basketball scores. After you complete the worksheet, check your answers for questions one, two, and three against the key and take the quiz below that evaluates what you have learned in this practice exercise. Make sure you are confident because you only have one shot at the quiz.

Evaluation

Each question will be checked for accuracy of calculations and the subjective questions will be evaluated based on the descriptive logic that you present. Please complete enter your answers in the form below and click submit when you are finished. Once you click submit you will not be able to edit it again. Please do not click submit until you are entirely finished.

Day 1 Answer Sheet