Nursing Preparation Study Guide

Nursing Preparation Study Guide

Let’s take a look at a histogram.

This is the typical structure of a histogram. What type of information can we obtain from a histogram? Although I have not assigned any actual data or numerical values, we can see that there are several parts to the histogram. • The solid box seems to be the highest. This represents the highest frequency for the data set. Therefore, if we were to look at a data set, the majority of the values would fall within the region of the solid box. • Now looking to the right and left of our highest frequency, we can see that the histogram is divided into two sides. The polka-dot and striped boxes are to the left of our highest frequencies. These represent higher values than our frequency. If that is confusing think of it this way. We will say the data represents the amount of time it takes students to complete an exam. Most of the students take 65 minutes to complete the exam (solid box), the polka-dot and striped boxes represent the number of students who take less than 65 minutes to complete the exam. We will say the striped box represents students who can complete the exam in 55 minutes and polka-dot box represents students who can complete the exam in 45 minutes. o You can see that there are fewer students who completed the exam in 45 minutes. • We also have data to the right of our highest frequency, the brick and checkered boxes. In our example, these boxes would represent students who took longer than 65 minutes to complete the exam. Let’s say the brick box represents students who took 75 minutes while the checkered box represents students who took 80 minutes to complete the exam. How can we interpret this data? We can say that the majority of the students can complete the exam in 65 minutes while a small portion of the student population can complete the exam in 45 minutes and 80 minutes. This information can give us an upper and lower range. 45minutes would be the fastest completion time, where-as 80 minutes would be the maximum upper time limit for the exam.

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