Section 5.4 Descriptive Statistics
Now that we have our data, let us do some digging to get some descriptive statistics regarding central tendency. As done before, we can create a summarized table.
# Creating a summarizing table
memory_summarized <- memory |>
group_by(method) |>
summarize(
mean_score = mean(score),
sd_score = sd(score),
n = n()
)
memory_summarized
# A tibble: 3 × 4 method mean_score sd_score n <chr> <dbl> <dbl> <int> 1 Flashcards 76.1 7.78 20 2 Rereading 69.5 7.47 20 3 Testing 85.7 6.70 20
Instead of writing all of the code manually, we can utilize the
favstats() command from the mosaic package ([D.1.14]).
library(mosaic)
favstats(score ~ method, data = memory)
method min Q1 median Q3 max mean sd n 1 Flashcards 59.26706 71.05157 75.95988 79.38981 89.29531 76.13299 7.781323 20 2 Rereading 54.81976 64.14098 68.74051 76.49688 81.28433 69.53869 7.469448 20 3 Testing 74.15873 82.06821 84.75004 89.43416 100.18269 85.74540 6.701384 20 missing 1 0 2 0 3 0
Some things we now see:
-
Testing has the highest minimum and maximum values in comparison to the other two methods
-
Testing has the highest median
-
Testing has the highest mean.
-
Testing has the lowest standard deviation
-
There are no missing values
These are early indications that testing is the best studying method if we want the highest memory scores.
