Presentations

Today in class we watched the presentations and had a review day. The common theme was "Mean, Median and Mode", but it was helpful to see the concept presented in multiple different ways. One way that that really "clicked" with me, was Hayley's presentation with the marshmallows. The main idea of this was to realize that you can really see the data a lot better if you put it into a visual (in this case, that was the marshmallows for a dot plot). This helps you to understand what the data is really telling you.

Just as a visual, here is a set of data and a graph concerning heights:

The graph is WAY more visually appealing than the data table and really let's you know a lot more about the dat just by looking at it!


Another presentation that left an impact was one that talked about the WHY behind using mean, median and mode.

I had never really thought about why you would need to use one over the other in certain situations, I always just found out all three because I was told to, or the mean because it is most commonly used.

That presentation got me thinking about how outliers can really affect your number, and finding the median would be more appropriate in situations where there are outliers because they would make the mean a little off, and therefore it would not be as effective of an indicator of the data.

Box and Whisker Plots

Box and Whisker plots are used as a way to display a set of data.  There are a lot of things you can tell about the data, by just looking at the graph. For instance, you know the range that the data falls within, and the median just from the first glance!

Here is what a box and whisker plot looks like:

There's a lot of information on here, but what does it all mean? 

Lower Quartile and Upper Quartile can be kind of confusing. 

Lower Quartile is the median of the lower half of the data set

and...

Upper Quartile is the median of the upper half of the data set 

Box and whisker plots are kind of unique, but they have many different real-life applications, such as...

• You can use them to compare different sets of data.
• You could use it to compare the heights of students in a classroom (I believe we did this in class).
• It would be a great way to look at test scores and see where the majority of the scores lie.