Statistics: Definition, Function, Role in Education

and Its Concepts

Definition of Statistics:
Statisticians have defined the term in different ways.

Some of the definitions are given below:

Longman Dictionary:

Statistics is a collection of numbers which represent facts or measurement.

Webster:
‘Statistics are the classified facts representing the conditions of the people in a state
especially those facts which can be stated in numbers or in tables of numbers of in any
tabular or classified arrangements.

A.L. Bowley:

Statistics are numerical statements of facts in any department of enquiry placed in relation
to each other.

H. Sacrist:
“By statistics we mean aggregate of facts affected to a marked extent by multiplicity of
causes, numerically expressed, enumerated or estimated according to reasonable standard
of accuracy, collected in a systematic manner for a predetermined purpose and placed in
relation to each other.”

Lovitt:
“Statistics is that which deals with the collection, classification and tabulation of numerical
facts as the basis for explanation, description and comparison of phenomena.”

From the above definitions it can be said that statistics is:

a. Numerical facts which can be measured enumerated and estimated.

b. Facts are homogeneous and related to each other.
c. Facts must be accurate.
d. It must be collected systematically.

Function of Statistics:
Statistics has a numerous functions to do.

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The following points explain the functions of statistics in summary:

1. It helps in collecting and presenting the data in a systematic manner.

2. It helps to understand unwisely and complex data by simplifying it.
3. It helps to classify the data.
4. It provides basis and techniques for making comparison.
5. It helps to study the relationship between different phenomena.
6. It helps to indicate the trend of behaviour.
7. It helps to formulate the hypothesis and test it.
8. It helps to draw rational conclusions.
Glass & Hopkins:
There are two widely divergent influences on the early development of statistical methods.
Statistics had a mother who was dedicated to keeping orderly records of governmental units
(state and statistics caome from the same root, status) and a gambling father who relied on
mathematics to increase his skill at playing the odds in games of chance. From the mother
sprang counting, measuring, describing, tabulating, ordering, and taking of censuses—all of
which led to modern descriptive statistics. From the father eventually came modern
inferential statistics, which is based suarely on theories of probability.
Statistics enables managers to know how to (Leven, Berenson and Stephan, 1999):
• Properly present and describe information (descriptive statistics)
• Draw conclusions about populations based on information obtained from
samples (inferential statistics)
• Improve processes (Continuous Improvement)
• Obtain reliable forecasts and predictions

Statistics in Education:
Measurement and evaluation are essential part of teaching learning process. In this process
we obtained scores and then interpret these score in order to take decisions. Statistics
enables us to study these scores objectively. It makes the teaching learning process more
efficient.

The knowledge of statistics helps the teacher in the following way:

1. It helps the teacher to provide the most exact type of description:

When we want to know about the pupil we administer a test or observe the child. Then
from the result we describe about the pupil’s performance or trait. Statistics helps the
teacher to give an accurate description of the data.

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2. It makes the teacher definite and exact in procedures and thinking:
Sometimes due to lack of technical knowledge the teachers become vague in describing
pupil’s performance. But statistics enables him to describe the performance by using proper
language, and symbols. Which make the interpretation definite and exact.

3. It enables the teacher to summarize the results in a meaningful and convenient

form:
Statistics gives order to the data. It helps the teacher to make the data precise and mean-
ingful and to express it in an understandable and interpretable manner.

4. It enables the teacher to draw general conclusions:

Statistics helps to draw conclusions as well as extracting conclusions. Statistical steps also
help to say about how much faith should be placed in any conclusion and about how far we
may extend our generalization.

5. It helps the teacher to predict the future performance of the pupils:

Statistics enables the teacher to predict how much of a thing will happen under conditions
we know and have measured. For example the teacher can predict the probable score of a
student in the final examination from his entrance test score. But the prediction may be
erroneous due to different factors. Statistical methods tell about how much margin of error
to allow in making predictions.

6. Statistics enables the teacher to analyse some of the causal factors underlying
complex and otherwise be-wildering events:
It is a common factor that the behavioural outcome is a resultant of numerous causal
factors. The reason why a particular student performs poor in a particular subject are varied
and many. So with the appropriate statistical methods we can keep these extraneous
variables constant and can observe the cause of failure of the pupil in a particular subject.

Important Concepts in Statistics:

In statistics, we generally want to study a population. You can think of a

population as a collection of persons, things, or objects under study. To study the
population, we select a sample. The idea of sampling is to select a portion (or subset) of the
larger population and study that portion (the sample) to gain information about the
population. Data are the result of sampling from a population.
Because it takes a lot of time and money to examine an entire population, sampling
is a very practical technique. If you wished to compute the overall grade point average at
your school, it would make sense to select a sample of students who attend the school. The
data collected from the sample would be the students' grade point averages. In presidential
elections, opinion poll samples of 1,000–2,000 people are taken. The opinion poll is
supposed to represent the views of the people in the entire country. Manufacturers of
canned carbonated drinks take samples to determine if a 16 ounce can contains 16
ounces of carbonated drink.
From the sample data, we can calculate a statistic. A statistic is a number that
represents a property of the sample. For example, if we consider one math class to be a

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sample of the population of all math classes, then the average number of points earned by
students in that one math class at the end of the term is an example of a statistic. The
statistic is an estimate of a population parameter. A parameter is a numerical characteristic
of the whole population that can be estimated by a statistic. Since we considered all math
classes to be the population, then the average number of points earned per student over all
the math classes is an example of a parameter.
One of the main concerns in the field of statistics is how accurately a statistic
estimates a parameter. The accuracy really depends on how well the sample represents the
population. The sample must contain the characteristics of the population in order to be a
representative sample. We are interested in both the sample statistic and the population
parameter in inferential statistics. In a later chapter, we will use the sample statistic to test
the validity of the established population parameter.
A variable, usually notated by capital letters such as X and Y, is a characteristic or
measurement that can be determined for each member of a population. Variables may be
numerical or categorical. Numerical variables take on values with equal units such as
weight in pounds and time in hours. Categorical variables place the person or thing into a
category.
If we let X equal the number of points earned by one math student at the end of a
term, then X is a numerical variable. If we let Y be a person's party affiliation, then some
examples of Y include Republican, Democrat, and Independent. Y is a categorical
variable.We could do some math with values of X (calculate the average number of points
earned, for example), but it makes no sense to do math with values of Y (calculating an
average party affiliation makes no sense).
Data are the actual values of the variable. They may be numbers or they may be
words. Datum is a single value.
Two words that come up often in statistics are mean and proportion. If you were to
take three exams in your math classes and obtain scores of 86, 75, and 92, you would
calculate your mean score by adding the three exam scores and dividing by three (your
mean score would be 84.3 to one decimal place). If, in your math class, there are 40
students and 22 are men and 18 are women, then the proportion of men students is 22/40
and the proportion of women students is 18/40. Mean and proportion are discussed in
more detail in later chapters.

Example:

Determine what the key terms refer to in the following study.

We want to know the average (mean) amount of money first year college students spend at
ABC College on school supplies that do not include books. We randomly surveyed 100
first year students at the college. Three of those students spent $150, $200, and $225,
respectively.

Solution
The population is all first year students attending ABC College this term.
The sample could be all students enrolled in one section of a beginning statistics course at
ABC College (although this sample may not represent the entire population).
The parameter is the average (mean) amount of money spent (excluding books) by first
year college students at ABC College this term.
The statistic is the average (mean) amount of money spent (excluding books) by first year

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college students in the sample.
The variable could be the amount of money spent (excluding books) by one first year
student. Let X = the amount of money spent (excluding books) by one first year student
attending ABC College.
The data are the dollar amounts spent by the first year students. Examples of the data are
$150, $200, and $225.

Main Forms of Data

For understanding the nature of data, it becomes necessary to study about the various
forms of data, as shown below:

1. Qualitative and Quantitative.

2. Continuous and Discrete Data.
3. Primary and Secondary Data.
Form # 1. Qualitative and Quantitative Data:
Let us consider a set of data given in Table 2.1:

In table 2.1, number of schools have been shown according to the management of schools.
So the schools have been classified into 4 categories, namely Government Schools, Local
Body Schools, Private Aided Schools and Private Unaided Schools. A given school belongs
to any one of the four categories. Such data is shown as Categorical or Qualitative Data.

Here the category or the quality referred to is management. Thus categorical or qualitative
data result from information which has been classified into categories. Such categories are
listed alphabetically or in order of decreasing frequencies or in some other conventional
way. Each piece of data clearly belongs to one classification or category.

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We frequently come across categorical or qualitative data which is unmeasurable with a
scale and as such is un-expressible in magnitude. Sex, nationality, occupation, religion,
type of crime, marital status, literacy etc., are the examples of qualitative data. People vary
according to sex as ‘male’ and ‘female’, according to nationality as ‘American’, ‘French’,
Italian’ or ‘Indian’.

Students in a
college may be
classified as
belonging to
‘Science’, ‘Arts’ or
‘Commerce’
faculty. In this
system of
classification there
is no natural
ordering in the
classes. It is either
purely arbitrary or done on the basis of the presence or absence of a particular attribute in
an individual or object.

In Table 2.2, number of students have been shown according to the heights. Students falling
in a specified range of heights are grouped together, e.g., there are 15 students within the
range of heights between 4.5″- 4.8″. As the grouping is based on numbers, such data are
called

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Numerical or Quantitative Data.

Whenever the measurement of a variable or data is possible on a scale in some appropriate

units, it is called a quantitative data. On such data, objects vary in magnitude and degree
and the measurements indicate such variation. Examples of quantitative data are: age,
height, income and intellectual ability etc.

Here age is measurable in years or months, height in cm., income in rupees and intellectual
ability in the forms of scores on a test. With quantitative data, objects can be placed into
ordered classes, i.e., we can say that one class is higher than the other on a continuum. The
observed weights of persons and the income they earn per month, the scores of 50 students
in an examination, the number of rooms in houses etc., are few examples of such
measurements.

Thus numerical or quantitative data results from counting or measuring. We frequently

come across numerical data in newspapers, advertisements etc. related to the temperature of
the cities, cricket averages, incomes, expenditures and so on.

Form # 2. Continuous and Discrete Data:

Numerical or quantitative data may be continuous or discrete depending on the nature of
the elements or objects being observed.

Let us consider the Table 2.3 depicting the heights of students of a class:

Table 2.3 gives the data pertaining to the heights of students of a class. Here the element
under observation is the
height of the students.
The height varies from
4’8″ to 5’10”. The height
of an individual may be
anywhere from 4’8″ to
5’10”. Two students may
vary by almost zero inch
height. Even if we take
two adjacent points, say
4’8.00″ and 4’8.01″ there
may be several values
between the two points.

Such data are called

Continuous Data, as the
height is continuous. Continuous Data arise from the measurement of continuous attributes
or variables, in which individual may differ by amounts just approaching zero. Weights and

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heights of children; temperature of a body; intelligence and achievement level of students,
etc. are the examples of continuous data.

Height of an individual cannot be measured with absolute accuracy and as such, we cannot
count the number of persons whose heights are exactly 16 cm. The actual height may vary
by a hundredth part of a centimetre from this figure. In such cases, therefore, the data are
given in relation to certain groups or class intervals.

In continuous series the statistical unit is capable of division and can be measured in
fractions of any size, no matter how small. In simple words, continuous variables form
continuous series. In such series items pass from value to value with fractional differences.

Discrete Data are characterised by gaps in the scale, for which no real values may ever be
found. Such data are usually expressed in whole numbers. The size of a family, enrolment
of children, number of books etc. are the examples of discrete data. Generally data arising
from measurement are continuous, while data arising from counting or arbitrary
classification are discrete.

Discrete data is capable of exact measurement and between the values of two succeeding
items definite breaks are visible. Statistical units, in case of discrete data, cannot be divided
and they remain complete and indivisible. They are formed by discrete facts, for example,
the number of workers working in industrial establishments or the number of houses are
incapable of sub-division. Similarly son, wife etc. cannot be divided into fractions.

The achievement scores of students, though presented in discrete form may be considered
to constitute continuous data, since a score of 24 represents any point between 23.5 and
24.5. Actually achievement is a continuous attribute or variable.

All measurements of continuous attributes are approximate in character and as such do not
provide a basis for distinguishing between continuous and discrete data. The distinction is

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made on the basis of variable being measured. ‘Height’ is a continuous variable but number
of children would give discrete data.

Form # 3. Primary and Secondary Data:

The data collected by or on behalf of the person or people who are going to make use of the
data refers to Primary Data. For example, the attendance of children, the result of
examinations conducted by you are primary data.

If you contact the parents of the children and ask about their educational qualifications to
relate them to the performance of the children, this also gives primary data. Actually, when
an individual personally collects data or information pertaining to an event, a definite plan
or design, it refers to primary data.

Sometimes an investigation may use the data already collected by some other person, such
as the school attendance of children, or performance of students in various subjects, etc. for
his/her study then the data are Secondary Data.

The data used by a person or people other than the people by whom or for whom the data
were collected refers to secondary data. For many reasons we may have to use secondary
data, which should be used carefully, since the data could have been collected with a
purpose different from that of the investigator and may lose some detail or may not be fully
relevant.

For using secondary data, it is always useful to know:

i. How the data have been collected and processed.

ii. The accuracy of the data.
iii. How far the data have been summarized.
iv. How comparable the data are with other tabulations.
v. And how to interpret the data, especially when figures collected for one purpose are used
for another purpose.