Teaching Quartile Location Using Sample Size Divisibility

Jon-Paul Paolino, Mercy College

Quartiles are descriptive measures of location that can be introduced to students as early as primary school and are taught at the tertiary education level across the world. To successfully locate the quartiles of a univariate data set, basic counting and arithmetic are required. However, particularly in the tertiary-level statistics course, there is often confusion among students when textbooks and technology explain quartile location using complex computational algorithms (i.e., interpolation and cumulative distribution functions). We can eliminate such confusion by providing a table of closed-form solutions for locating the three quartiles.

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