Content description

Construct back-to-back stem-and-leaf plots and histograms and describe data, using terms including 'skewed', 'symmetric' and 'bi modal' (ACMSP282)

Source: Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA)

Stem-and-leaf plots

Numerical data (quantitative data) consists of values in which there is a definite numerical order, for example, scores in a test or heights of students in a class.
A stem-and-leaf plot can be used to represent numerical data.
A stem-and-leaf plot represents the values of the data set in the form of a stem and a leaf.
The stem is the first digit of a two-digit number, or the first two digits of a three-digit-number, and so on.
The leaf is usually the last digit of the value.

Example 1

The marks out of 50 obtained by 16 students in a Mathematics test are:

43

24

29

19

11

14

25

17

32

27

29

7

14

19

39

49

Represent this information on a stem-and-leaf plot.

Solution

We use the first digit of each mark as the stem, writing 7 as 07.

0	7
1	1 4 4 7 9 9
2	4 5 7 9 9
3	2 9
4	3 9	3\(\mid\)2 represents a mark of 32

We can see that stem-and-leaf plots are useful for displaying the shape of the data and giving the reader a quick overview. They retain most of the raw numerical data and are useful for highlighting outliers and finding the mode.