Intro to Statistics Critical Thinking

Remember to think of the critical thinking assignments as you presenting research. Your paper should have an introduction that provides an overview of the study, the body of the paper should address the questions in the assignment, and the conclusion should provide a final analysis where you highlight some conclusions you found from the research.

OPTION 1: MALLS

Remember relative frequency is basically the same thing as finding the probability. You are representing how often something has happened as a percentage.

The formula for relative frequency/probability is:

Number of Successes/ Total Number.

So in question 1 and 2, you are doing a lot of counting with the data. It sometimes helps to sort the column of data to make it easier to count. For question 1 you have to look at each spending column for each of the malls and determine out of the 150 people how many of them spent at least $15. So basically the number of success would be the number of responses that were answered with numbers 1-6. The only response that would not be counted as a success is a 7, since this means less than $15.

For question 2, you are looking at the column of data for variable 11: highest goods. For each mall you are going to calculate the relative frequency. This question asked which mall had the highest quality goods. There were four possible answers. 1: Springdale, 2: Downtown, 3: West; 4:No opinion. So you will tally all the results and right them as relative frequencies. Which means total number of success/total number

For question 3, you have to use a contingency chart.

Here is what the contingency table should look like. You have to create one of these for each of the three malls.

# of females # of males 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

TOTAL:

So you need to find out how many females for each of the categories and then you will add up all the numbers in categories 1 through 6 and divide this by the total number of females. Then do the same thing for the male column.

OPTION 2: GRADUATION AND PUBLICATIONS

We give you a spreadsheet with information, you will need to fill in the rest of the spreadsheet and include it as an attachment with your paper. So option 2 requires you to calculate quite a few probabilities. You are still using the formula for probability: Number of Successes/ Total Number. The following hints below will help you fill out your excel sheet:

Probability of Graduated: Total number of students who graduated/ Total number of students

Probability of Publications: Total number of Publications/ Total number of students

When they have you determine the given part P (P|G) read the Probability of a publications given that they were graduated…..the given part just tells you what to use for your bottom number. So instead of using total number of students on bottom, you are going to use number of graduated students. So to find this probability you do : Number of Publications/ Number of students who graduated.

RANKING

You will personally rank the data for each category based on the probabilities you found. These ranking will be placed in columns G, I, and K.

Then it asks for a sum of rankings. For each professor, all you need to do is add their rankings. So basically take G+I+K. Based on the sum of the rankings, you will decide how to rank the professors overall.

Because the spreadsheet is your stats and a large document. For this assignment you do not need to have all the stats in your paper. As you write your paper, you can just refer to the spreadsheet. Again make sure both the paper and spreadsheet are turned in.