ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to present the descriptive statistics, which are essential for classroom practice. The widespread availability of computers and customized software has made the computations of statistics as simple as striking a key on a keyboard or a click of the mouse. Astute users of statistics can convey different meaning with the same data by using different measures of central tendency. Some understanding of statistics and data analysis is a requirement for virtually all professionals that work with people, especially teachers. Alternatively, when an instructor is interpreting scores from standardized tests, the reference group is a much larger one than only the teacher’s own class, which, in this case, is a subset or a sample. A knowledgeable teacher can usually make good inferences about the test or underlying composition of the samples based on the nature of the distribution whether it is skewed, bimodal, or rectangular.
