Statistics - How good is "good enough"?

In both Chemistry and Physics, students analyze data.  Typical student answers when it comes to accepting or rejecting data include data points being "close", "really close", "kind of close", "sort of close", etc.  In order to determine mathematically whether or not to accept certain data points, we use simple forms of standard deviation and outlier determination.  Although we will cover this in depth in class, here are some additional helpful resources:

Standard Deviation (ST DEV)

• Math Is Fun (ST DEV)
• About.com (ST DEV)
• Missouri University Psychology
• University of Florida - ST DEV on Calculators
• U-Conn ST DEV in Excel
• PSU - Spreadsheets in Google Docs

Outlier Determination

• Outliers Using Box-and-Whisker Plots
• WikiHow Outlier Calculation Steps
• Excel Outlier Steps (pdf)
• Simple Outlier Steps (pdf)