How many times can you write statistics in a minute?

1. How many times can you write statistics in a minute? By: Madeline Stenken and Tara Levine

2. Introduction • Gave choice of pencil or pen • Asked if they were right or left-handed • Had to write statistics completely and correctly in one minute • Wanted to see how writing utensils and dominant hands affect how many times you can write statistics in a minute

3. # Of Times Written In One Minute The mean of the number of times students wrote “statistics” in a minute was 16.48 while the median was 17, so the averages were close. The shape is clustered and slightly left skewed. Because it is left skewed and not symmetric, it does not fit the normal model even though it is unimodal. Also, there is an outlier at 10 which we calculated because the lower fence of the data is 13, and ten is below that. 20, however, is not an outlier because the upper fence is at 21, and 20 is not above that fence. The range is 10, with the max at 20 and the min at 10.

4. Partner Comparison Both of our means were close to 16 and our medians were both 17, showing that we had the same centers. However, Tara’s data had a wider range, with being 10 with an outlier, and Madeline’s was only 4. Tara’s and Madeline’s data were both left skewed, but Madeline’s was unimodal and clustered while Tara’s was uniform in the middle with a wide peak for being unimodal and was more spread out.

5. Comparing Dominant Hand With # of Times Written The data for left-handed people was uniform and spread out, with the range being 8 (10-18), which was wider than right-handed people’s range which was 7 (13-20). Additionally, left handed people’s center was around 14.8 while right handed was around 16.8. Right-handed data was more symmetric. We conclude that the statistics for this category are difficult to analyze because there were not many left-handed people in the class, so the data was only drawn from very few students.

6. The graph for people using a pen was unimodal and roughly symmetric and the graph for people using a pencil was also unimodal, but it seems to have a very slight left skew. The pen graph has a center of about 16.67, while the center for the pencil graph is about 16. The range for the pen graph is 7 (13-20) which is lower than the range for the pencil graph which is 10 (10-20). The only reason that the range is so large for pencil though is because of the outlier at 10. Both graphs have the same maximum of 20. Comparison of Writing Utensil in Relation to # of Times Written

7. Dominant Hand: Left: 5/31=16.13% Right: 26/31=83.87% Writing Utensil: Pen: 16/31=51.61% Pencil: 15/31=48.39% Marginal Distributions

8. Conditional Distributions • Dominant Hand: • Left: • Pen: 3/5=60% • Pencil: 2/5=40% • Right: • Pen: 13/26=50% • Pencil: 13/26=50% • Writing Utensil: • Pen: • Left: 3/16=18.75% • Right: 13/16=81.25% • Pencil: • Left: 2/15=13.33% • Right: 13/15=86.67%

9. Marginal and Conditional Distributions It is clear that there are mostly right-handed people in the class, but there was almost an equal amount of people who chose to use pen or pencil. For left handed people it was pretty even on their writing utensil choice and for right handed people it actually was even. And since none of the calculations matched up, the variables are dependent from one another.

10. Bias, Errors, and Variability One discrepancy in our data was that there were so few left-handed people, so the data from them was not necessarily an effective sample for this category. Also, it may not make much of a difference but if we counted the times people wrote half of the word, the results may have been different. Also, if we would have taken legibility into account, the results may have differed.

11. Conclusion From our data we can conclude that whether you are left handed or right handed and whether you use pen or pencil can affect the amount of times you can write statistics in a minute. We also concluded that there are a lot more kids in our class that are right handed than left handed, but there is an even distribution of kids who like to use pen or pencil.