Welcome to Our Statistics Homeschool Math Course

Getting Started with Our Statistics Homeschool Math Course

The Statistics homeschool math course is taught by Kathy Lapan, a former middle school math teacher who currently homeschools two children. This course is presented to help students understand the statistics they encounter in everyday life and confidently interpret them. Statistics lessons are best studied sequentially, beginning with Unit One, Introduction to Statistics. Worksheets are provided and specific answer keys are available.

Overview

• 18 weeks, 5 days a week
• Includes downloadable lessons, assignments, course texts, and answer keys
• Grades: 10–11

Supplies Needed

Corresponding material on SchoolhouseTeachers.com; journal for notetaking and research

What to Do

Go to Class Lessons and download the lesson plan, course texts, lessons file, worksheets file, and answer keys. Start with the Day 1 reading assignment. Follow the instructions each day on the lesson plan and check them off when completed.

Course Sample for Our Statistics Homeschool Math Course

Introduction to Statistics

What are Statistics?

• Statistic: a numerical fact
  • A statistic is a quantifiable fact, such as a temperature, a total, an amount of money, etc.
  • The study of statistics is the manipulation of these facts to glean information

What aren’t Statistics?

(Excuse the grammar!)

• Not guesses
• Not made up
• Not useless

Vocabulary

• Demographic: a vital or statistic about a population, such as age, gender, or racial identity
  • Demographics can be used to describe anything for which statistics are being gathered. For instance, a demographic for a series of temperatures could be the location at which the temperatures were recorded. However this term is usually applied to people.
• Sample: a subset of the population
  • A sample is used when the population is too large for statistics to be useful or collected.
• Population: a group sharing one or more demographics
  • For instance, all US citizens
• Mean: average
• Mode: number that occurs the most in a range
• Median: the middle number when a range of numbers are in order
• Probability: chances, odds
• Hypothesis: a proposition assumed as a premise in an argument; what you are trying to disprove
  • This is the educated guess for which we are gathering statistics.
• Range: difference between largest number and smallest number in a set
• Bell (normal) distribution: theoretical frequency distribution represented by a normal curve
• Outlier: an observation, result, well outside the expected range of values
• Variance (mean square deviation): the square of the standard deviation
• Standard Deviation: a measure of dispersion in a frequency distribution, equal to the square root of the mean of the squares of deviations from the arithmetic mean of the distribution
  • Represented by the Greek letter sigma: σ
  • This isn’t as difficult as it sounds!
• Z-score: a measure that quantifies the distance a data point is from the mean in a range

To view a full sample of this class, click here.