Descriptive Statistics

Descriptive statistics help to summarize data.   Descriptive statistics do not allow you to make conclusions beyond the data you have collected or reach conclusions regarding any hypotheses you might have made. They are simply a way to describe your data.  Descriptive statistics are very important because if you simply presented your raw data it would be hard to visualize what the data was showing, especially if there was a lot of it.

Common descriptive statistics used in IB Biology are:

• Outlier analysis
• Skew
• Measures of central tendency (mean, median or mode)
• Measures of Spread (range, standard deviation or  quartiles)
• Correlation coefficient