General Guidelines for doing statistics with a scientific 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.

* Does your calculator have a statistics mode? If so, how do you get into it?

* How do you enter one-variable data?

* After you have the data in, can you punch something and see how many data points you have entered?

* After you have the one-variable data in, what button(s) do you push to get the mean?

* What button(s) do you push to get the standard deviation? (Probably there are two -- one with n and
one with n-1. For our purposes, we want the n-1.

* If your calculator has two-variable statistics, it will have different keys for the mean of x and the mean of y. Also, there is probably a different statistics mode for one-variable statistics and two-variable statistics. Sometimes the mode for one-variable statistics is called the “standard deviation” mode and for two-variable statistics, the “regression” mode.

* How do you erase all the statistics data in the calculator so that you can start over?

Last updated June 1, 2006 . Mary Parker