Resource Library

This dataset contains a number of variables like birth rate, death rate, life expectancy, and Gross National Product for 97 countries. Suggested activities are geared toward non-mathematicians and include exploratory graphical analyses to answer several central questions. Key words: boxplot, scatterplot, population growth

This article describes a dataset on the readability of booklets about cancer and the reading levels of patients with cancer. Students should be familiar with scales of measurement, data reduction, measuring center, constructing and interpreting displays, and reaching conclusions in real problems. Key Words: Ordinal data, Means, Medians, Histograms

This article describes a dataset on life expectancies, densities of people per television set, and densities of people per physician in various countries of the world. The example addresses correlation versus causation and data transformations. Key Word: Prediction.

This article describes a dataset containing information on economic class of passengers and mortality rates from the sinking of the Titanic. The dataset can be used to foster statistical thinking by giving students the data and asking them to determine the source.

This article describes a dataset containing information on bacterium culturing. Students can use graphical methods, one-way and two-way ANOVA, and multiple polynomial regression to estimate the optimal conditions for bacteria growth. Key Words: Analysis of variance; Exploratory data analysis; Interactions; Optimisation; Outlier.

This article describes a dataset containing energy use data for single-family homes and monthly weather data in the Boston area over a seven year period. The data can help illustrate concepts like central tendency, dispersion, time series analysis, correlation, simple and multiple regression, and variable transformations. Key Words: measurement; forecasting.

The dataset described in this article contains information on 345 plays on an electronic slot machine and the prize for each. This data can be used to illustrate parametric bootstrapping and tests of independence for two and three-way contingency tables involving random zeroes. Key Words: Simulation; Elementary probabilities.

This activity uses Microsoft Excel to estimate the population variance of grouped data two ways: the variance within a group and the variance between groups. This activity accompanies Section 7.3 of Data Matters.

This article provides a data collection and analysis activity for illustrating simple linear regression and outlier analysis. The activity was designed to involve students in the process of data collection and to motivate studying the relationship between two quantitative variables. Students collect data on occurrences of letters in English text. These data are used to study the relationships between how often a letter occurs in English text, and: (1) the letter's Morse Code units and (2) the relative frequency of Scrabbleä‹¢ game tiles for the letter. Worksheets and answers to the activities are provided.

This Department of Energy website provides weekly average gasoline prices for several regions, states and cities. The averages are produced from a weekly survey of around 800 retail gasoline stations. The site includes information on data collection methods, survey methodology and historical data.