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Resources for AP Statistics, 2009-2010 · May 29, 02:01 PM

Welcome to AP Statistics. Like many AP classes at Aiken High, AP Statistics includes some summer work. You’ll read a book and you’ll complete a few short assignments. The assignments are designed to refresh your memory about statistics you already know.

What’s missing?

I have omitted some basic practice with probability. You have other important things to do this summer instead. If probability is already an interest of yours, you may want to read up, but I don’t expect it.

Short assignments

Once you finish the assignments listed below, I will expect you to be able to do the following:

And that’s all. Put another way, you should know when to use and how to hand prepare these graphs: pie charts, bar graphs, histograms, stem-and-leaf plots, frequency polygons, line plots and dotplots. (You can skip box-and-whisker plots, for now). Many of these are graphs you started drawing in elementary school. The rest of the material assigned is context. When you come back to school, you should be ready to draw any of these graphs with data I provide.

  1. Introduction: read and complete the self-test exercises on the following pages.
    1. (5 minutes) What are statistics?.
    2. (5 minutes) The importance of statistics
    3. (10 minutes) Types of variables. See my footnote1.
    4. (30 minutes) (Optional) Against All Odds, Episode 1. Some of you may want to watch this show, too. We’ll watch pieces from the series throughout the year. You must register, but watching is free.
  2. Graphs: read and complete the self-test exercises on the following pages.
    1. (10 minutes) Graphing qualitative variables
    2. (1 hour or less) Graphing quantitative variables. Break this one up because it’s important. Go through all the links. (You can skip box-and-whisker plots, for now).
    3. (30 minutes) (Optional) Against All Odds, Episode 2. This website requires you to register, but watching is free. This episode illustrates histograms well.

1 I’m skipping you down to the section about quantitative and qualitative variables. You don’t need to read the material that precedes it. You should read the material that follows it, however. Also, our textbook refers to qualitative variables as categorical variables. I’ll use the term “categorical variable” much more often.