Numbers 1.3 - maybe I do love you Excel

I find myself wishing I had more reason to use Excel on a day to day basis because frankly, it is VERY COOL, but I don't use it enough to do anything easily.  This assignment was okay though because I just finished Measurement and Statistics and we used these same functions.  This was a good opportunity to practice them.  With that in mind, I used the Data Analysis Toolpak I had installed in the fall to do the calculations and then I did them again using the functions. I have no idea what half of the results  mean in the first chart I created, but I left it all in there in case it is useful to someone smarter than me.  In the second (down below the original data) I simply calculated what was required.  Here is my finished product.

Clearly, females have higher 8th grade reading scores than males, with an average that is 10 points higher. The highest female score beat the highest male score by 7 points while the lowest female scores was a full 14 points higher than the lowest male score.  There is a lot of evidence that girls read more for enjoyment than boys, and the types of reading that boys do enjoy is not as encouraged in the schools as the fiction is that girls prefer.  This chapter from a report by PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) documents that this phenomena is generally true not only in the US, but in all countries other than Korea.

Sadly, Virginia is not making us proud as far as this data goes.  Out of 50 states, the District and DoDEA, we are 24th.  We did beat 28 other jurisdictions and our overall average of 267.6 beats the average for all states by a full point..  Unfortunately, our scores falls 10 points behind the top score posted by Massachusetts.  White and Hispanic students in VA kept the same -10 ratio with those groups in MA, although black students in Virginia trailed black students in MA by only 5 points.


Virginia is a diverse state with several school systems that consider themselves "World Class."  I wonder how a regional breakdown of scores would compare to these.