video placement

[Intro: Starting from a sentence or two discussing Question 1, remind students that they have recently been working to calculate and interpret the mean and median of a data set. That is, the median is the value that splits the data in half, with half the observations above the mean and half below, regardless of the presence of skew or outliers. The median is fixed. But the mean is not; it gets pulled to the left or right of the mean under the presence of skew or outliers. The mean is sensitive to extreme values. So when we see that the mean is higher than the median, we say that it has been “pulled to the right,” and we understand the quantitative variable is skewed right. Likewise, if the mean is smaller, we’ll say it’s been “pulled to the left,” and we understand the quantitative variable is skewed left. If the mean and median are similar, though, we understand that the distribution is symmetric. In this activity, we’ll use a distribution of professional basketball salaries to explore how skew arises in a quantitative variable and why we must be careful to consider all the characteristics of a quantitative variable’s distribution before deciding if the mean or median would be more responsible to use as a measure of a “typical” value. ]