Learning Intention: Students will understand the meanings of the terms “mean”, “median”, “mode” and “range” and be able to calculate these summary statistics from data supplied to them.

Success Criteria: Students will be able to calculate the mean, median, mode and range from given data.

We are now doing a unit of work on statistics and you will need to know the following terms:

• Categorical data (cannot be measured by quantity, for example, colour of eyes, favourite footy team)
• Numerical data (can be measured by quantity, for example, number of students at school)
• Continuous data (eg. height, weight, length of foot) can be a decimal number.
• Discrete data  (eg. number of pages in a book, number of students in a class) cannot be a fraction or decimal.
• Mean = average (total of all scores divided by number of scores)
• Median = middle score (arrange data from smallest to largest and find the middle number)
• Mode = most frequent score
• Range = difference between largest and smallest score

The Australian Bureau of Statistics collects data to assist businesses and the government to plan for the future – where to build freeways, hospitals and schools, for example. Every four years they distribute a census across Australia to gather data about housing and population. How is a “survey” different to a “census”? Each year they invite schools to particpate in the “CensusAtSchool” program, which I have signed us up to. After you have completed the survey, we can use the data to work out the summary statistics for the “hours of sleep per night“. There are some other great activities we can do at quick maths activities from the census at school survey.