Results

Descriptive Statistics

From the resulting table, we can see that, on average, students attended nearly 60% of lectures, obtained 58% in their JASP exam, scored only 51% on the computer literacy test, and only 5 out of 15 on the numeracy test. In addition, the standard deviation for computer literacy was relatively small compared to that of the percentage of lectures attended and exam scores. The range of scores on the exam was wide (15-99%) as was lecture attendence (8-100%).

Descriptive statistics and histograms are a good way of getting an instant picture of the distribution of your data. This snapshot can be very useful:

- The exam scores look suspiciously bimodal (there are two peaks, indicative of two modes). The bimodal distribution of JASP exam scores alerts us to a trend that students are typically either very good at statistics or struggle with it (there are relatively few who fall in between these extremes). Intuitively, this finding fits with the nature of the subject: once everything falls into place it's possible to do very well on statistics modules, but before that enlightenment occurs it all seems hopelessly difficult!

- The numeracy test has produced very positively skewed data (the majority of people did very badly on this test and only a few did well). This corresponds to what the skewness statistic indicated.

- Lecture attendance looks relatively normally distributed. There is a slight negative skew suggesting that although most students attend at least 40% of lectures there is a small tail of students whop attend very few lectures. These students might have disengaged from the module and perhaps need some help to get back on track.

- Computer literacy is fairly normally distributed. A few people are very good with computers and a few are very bad, but the majority of people have a similar degree of knowledge).