A Visual Model for the Variance and Standard Deviation


Authors: 
J. B. Orris
Volume: 
33(2)
Pages: 
online
Year: 
2011
Publisher: 
Teaching Statistics
URL: 
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9639.2010.00426.x/abstract
Abstract: 

This paper shows how the variance and standard deviation can be represented graphically by looking at each squared deviation as a graphical object - in particular, as a square. A series of displays show how the standard deviation is the size of the average square.

The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education