Statistics: SD: How Far is Typical?

Objectives

• Students will identify the standard deviation as a measure of spread about the mean of a distribution and loosely interpret it as an "average" or typical distance from the mean.

Vocabulary

• deviation
• dotplot
• mean
• range
• residual
• standard deviation

About the Lesson

This lesson involves gaining a basic understanding of what standard deviation is measuring by examining the location of data around the mean.

As a result, students will:

• Find the sum of the residuals to be 0 and consider both squaring and absolute value to eliminate the negative values.
• Compare the standard deviation to the mean of the absolute values of the residuals as the data changes.
• Change the amount of snowfall by moving data points and comparing the squared standard deviation and the mean of the squared residuals in the plots.