Graduate Discussion Rubric-Overview To complete this assignment, review below

Your active participation in the discussions is essential to your overall success this term. Discussion questions will help you make meaningful connections between the course content and the larger concepts of the course. These discussions give you a chance to express your own thoughts, ask questions, and gain insight from your peers and instructor.

Directions

For each discussion, you must create
one initial post and follow up with at least
two classmate response posts.

For your
initial post, do the following:

· Write a post of 1 to 2 paragraphs.

· Consider content from other parts of the course where appropriate. Use proper citation methods for your discipline when referencing scholarly or popular sources.

Initial Post Question:

We know that many types of data fall into a normal distribution, with most of the observations falling toward the middle. However, sometimes there are outliers, or data points that are very different (i.e., larger or smaller) from the others in the sample. An example from psychology would be Mensa, which requires 98th percentile on a valid, normed test of intelligence for admission. Mensa members are therefore outliers, although some are more so than others. Review the Slate article on the New England Patriots from the module resources,
https://slate.com/culture/2015/01/new-england-fumbles-the-patriots-incredible-ball-security-is-not-impossible-but-its-also-not-meaningless.html for an example of an outlier in the real world. Choose an example of an outlier in the real world and discuss its effect. When responding to your classmates’ posts, evaluate the effects of their chosen outliers.

For your classmate
response posts, do the following:

· Reply to at least
two classmates outside of your own initial post thread.

· In Module One, complete your two response posts by Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Eastern.

· In Modules Two through Ten, complete your two response posts by Sunday at 11:59 p.m. of your local time zone.

· Demonstrate more depth and thought than saying things like “I agree” or “You are wrong.” Guidance is provided for you in the discussion prompt.

Classmate response 1-LC

An example of an outlier in real life are those who are significantly smarter than the average human. When I make this statement, the examples that may come to mind are Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc. These are all people who have been deemed geniuses not only by testing, but by society as well. The average human IQ is 100. Most people will range from 85 to 115 (Gepp & Gillette, 2022). If you were to look up the three humans I had listed, their IQ scores are well over the average and are around 160. They are considered an outlier because if we were to test a sample size, most of that sample size would rank in the average intelligence. If one of those three or a genius is in that sample size, we would see an outlier due to an IQ of that ranking is not the norm. An outlier can affect the mean of this testing group in a positive or negative way due to the outlier. Statistically, an outlier can also mean that something went wrong in the experiment thus leading to disproportionate data which leads to misinterpretations. Geniuses will be found in this world, but their IQ is not an average score which makes them an outlier of the general population.

References:

Gillette, H. (2022, October 24).
What is the average IQ?. Psych Central. https://psychcentral.com/health/average-iq#what-science-says

Classmate response 2-GF

Rosnow and Rosenthal (2014) define outliers as scores lying far outside the normal range. A score that lies far outside the normal range can disrupt homogeneity. One example of an outlier in the real world is men much taller than the average human. The global average height of adult men is 5 feet and 7.5 inches (Roser, Appel, & Ritchie, 2019). One sport known for having some of the tallest players is the NBA. The average height for NBA players is 6 feet 6 inches, 9 and ½ inches taller than the average global height for males. Some honorable mentions include basketball players Gheorghe Muresan (7 feet 7 inches), Yao Ming  (7 feet 6 inches), and Chuck Nevitt (7 feet 5 inches). If you were to test global male height from a sample size, most of the sample would fall into an average height, or between 5 foot 6 inches and 5 foot 8 inches. However, if we included one of the previously mentioned NBA players in the sample, there would be an outlier due to their height being significantly outside the normal range. Outliers can cause distributed scores to be strongly asymmetrical, but you can fix this by trimming the mean. A trimmed mean is when “mean of a distribution from which a specified highest and lowest percentage of scores has been dropped” (Rosnow & Rosenthal, 2014). 

References

Roser, M., Appel, C., and Ritchie, H. (2019). Human Height. 
https://ourworldindata.org/human-height

Rosnow, R. L., & Rosenthal, R.  (2014). Beginning Behavioral Research,  7th Edition. [VitalSource Bookshelf 10.3.3].  Retrieved from vbk://9780133557084