5 Summary of Week 3
Week 3 has focused on measures of location and dispersion, mainly the mean, the median, the mode and the range. You have looked at how to calculate these four summary statistics and explored how they might be introduced and explained to learners. Finally, you have touched on how a teacher might extend these ideas and pre-empt common difficulties when teaching them to a learner/set of learners.
These four measures are key in a lot of statistical work – both in the classroom and beyond school. You will return to them many times – including in the next two weeks, when you look at graphs.
Having taught the purpose of these summary statistics, let’s end with a rhyme that some students find helpful to distinguish between them:
Hey diddle, diddle, the median’s the middle,
You add then divide for the mean,
The mode is the one that you see the most,
And the range is the difference between.
You can now move onto Week 4 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .
Further reading/listening/watching
This OpenLearn article provides a nice summary of averages:
Averages | OpenLearn - Open University
The nrich website provides fun puzzles useful for further developing understanding of different concepts such as the mean, median and mode. Try some more puzzles here:
For more information about selecting quartile values see this article.