Reflective Writing

Math 1040
Sarah Nielson
December 3, 2014
Through the course of this semester as I have taken Math 1040 I have been very intrigued
by the statistical analysis going on around me. It is in my daily life and plays a very critical part
in the decisions most people make. I noticed that many commercials throw out statistical data
some of which had been modified to apply towards a specific group(s) of people. With the
knowledge I have gained this semester from taking Math 1040 I feel better equipped to read and
interpret statistics without being unnecessarily swayed.
This term project started out by utilizing StatCrunch to create a pie chart, pareto chart,
tables to display data, a histogram and a boxplot. Each of these are skills that I learned through
step-by-step exercises in StatCrunch which helped me better visualize the data. As I continued
through the course the concepts that I was learning applied almost directly to the project which
gave me a better platform to really study and gain a greater understanding of the concepts. It
really helped me that the project was broken into parts every few weeks so I was able to
concentrate on the specific concepts I was learning in class and then how they applied to the
project. The math skills that I learned will be very applicable to other classes and my career
because they help distinguish what and how statistical data is used. It is very important to have
an understanding of Statistics in my opinion because it is a prominent part of my life each day.

The project took a real situation in life and showed how many processes can be modeled
by mathematics. Using statistics a company can measure the variance in their product and then
adjust the process according to need. Such a case could be the trial of a new medication. If the
sample size and confidence interval can be determined then a company can state with an

indicated amount of confidence, plus or minus and error, that the medication is or is not effective
depending on what the success is characterized as. This project showed me how math can be
applied to real life situations and that the statistics that I most often hear and/or read are based on
calculations that have generally required many concepts such as hypothesis tests, confidence
intervals, charts, calculations and so forth.