Think of a question you're interested in and a set of data that might be useful in answering that question.
Do you think that a list of numbers is the most useful way to look at the data, or would some graphs be useful?
If graphs, which kinds of graphs?
OK - that was so open-ended that I can't really say much about what you were thinking of without more details.
What I can do is give you an example of how I might have answered that, and the graphs I would have prepared to help answer the questions.
As you read this, do not spend any time trying to decide how you will make graphs like these. You'll learn that during the course. Just concentrate on looking at the graphs and seeing how they illustrate the ideas I mention.
Here's my example. (It's maybe not the most interesting example, but it is real data and pretty easy to understand.)
Professor McLaren, over several semesters, collected data from her students about height, shoe size, and gender. Here are a few questions we might use these data to investigate, for the population that this sample represents.
For women, what are typical shoe sizes? What are unusual shoe sizes?
For men, what are typical heights? What are unusual heights?
For all the students in the sample, if we use height to predict shoe size, are the predictions pretty good?
Discussion of these questions: View Download
Other comments about graphs using these data: View Download
References:
Read the story: http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v20n3/mclaren/documentation.doc
Look at the data: http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v20n3/mclaren/shoesize.xls
Article: http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v20n3/mclaren.pdf
There may be multiple ways to make a correct and useful graph to answer a question.
Different types of data (one variable or multiple variables, categorical data or quantitative data) require different kinds of graphs.
Some of the questions we answer using graphs do not have precise answers. (Examples: What are "typical" data values? What are "unusual" data values?)
The first two graphs I made in this document View Download are dotplots. Have you ever seen such graphs being made? Would you like to see that? Look at this website with two simple applets showing how a dotplot is made and histogram
is made: http://www.tlok.org/visualize/stat-prelim/