7th Grade Stats Sample Blog Post: How many Pets do middle school students and teachers have?

Attendees of the UCLA Math Department Curtis Center: 2014 Mathematics & Teaching Conference

Thanks for coming to my session. Check out resources from our discussion here. 

This is a sample Blog Post:

In math class, we are learning about statistics and how we can use statistics to make guesses about large populations. My population is middle school students. My sample size was 30, selected at random from the 50 middle school students who responded to my survey. 

Random sampling means that everyone in the population has an equal shot of being asked the question. We did not do a pure random sample but instead randomly selected three samples of 30 from our data using excel.

Variability of student data

As you can see in my box plots for pets for students, each sample has a median of 1. It is reasonable to infer that middle school kids probably have 1 pet.

The hardest part of this project was getting volunteers to take my survey. See below for what my survey looks like.

Next I will compare my results for teachers vs students. For this I chose 1 random sample at random (I rolled a dice) from the student data and compared with the results from the teacher surveys.

Teachers have a higher median number of pets. Maybe they need the company while they are grading papers.