Welcome to Our Statistics Homeschool Math Course

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.