General Guidelines for calculating simple statistics with a graphing calculator

Read through these questions below and the manual that came with your calculator and try to answer them. If you don’t have a manual, go online to the manufacturer’s website and try to find the manual. You’ll only need to read two or three pages – on statistics – so there is no need to print the whole manual. Don’t spend more than about 20 minutes on this. If it seems to take longer, please bring the portions of the manual to your instructor and get help reading them.

* How do you enter data? And then how do you view the data? (Probably you will set up a list.)

* How can you be sure that you don't have any old data in the list that will cause you to get wrong answers because it is mixed with the new data? (Be sure that you can view the entire list, or at least that you know how to delete all the contents of a list before you start putting in the current data.)

* How do you start doing statistics? (Probably you will call up a statistics menu.)

* After you have the data in, and you call up the statistics menu, then how do you find the mean?

* After you have the data in, and you call up the statistics menu, then how do you find the standard deviation? (Probably there are two -- one that says population standard deviation and one that says sample standard deviation. We want the one called sample standard deviation. It is likely labeled s. This is the one with denominator n-1 rather than with n.)

* As far as I know, all graphing calculators do two-variable statistics as well as one-variable statistics, so you can use them to find the correlation between two variables, or the regression equation. You are not required to do that in this course, since we use MINITAB extensively, but you may choose to use the calculator to do it sometimes.

Last updated June 1, 2006 . Mary Parker