Statistics Homework

Question

The number of hours you spent studying each day last week was as follows:

Monday – 2    Tuesday – 1    Wednesday – 3    Thursday – 2    Friday – 1

What is the mean number of hours that you spent studying? _______

What is the mode? _______

What is the median? _______

Which measure of central tendency is most descriptive for this question?

Answer 1

Mean = 9/5 = 1.8 = the arithmetic average = 1+2+2+3 +1= 9, divide by 5

Mode = 3, the highest frequency 3>2>1

Median = 2, the middle number when ranked in order of size 1,1,2,2,3 2 is in the middle

Mode is least descriptive of the data. It's almost an outlier. Remove it and the average time, the mean and median would both be 1 1/2 hours

the hours are skewed slightly to the smaller hours, making the mean slightly <median

1.8 and 2 are very close

mean or median is very descriptive.

IF you want to know how often the student studies each daay, mean is probably more descriptive: one hour and 48 minutes. It's also closer to the mean and median if you treated 3 as an outlier