Estimate
What is an estimate in statistics?
An educated guess about the population, made from the sample.
An estimate is a claim about the pot based on the spoonful. It is an educated guess, and it has to rely on a replicable method or formula. These methods and their replicability are what separate good statistics from opinion and speculation.
Because it is still a guess, an estimate deserves careful language. "About a third of the teens we interviewed prefer weekends with friends over weekends at home" is honest. "A third of teenagers prefer weekends with friends over weekends at home" promises more than our interviews can deliver. Being able to detect mistakes like these in our own writing and in the news is a big part of what data literacy is.
From our own dataset
"About a third of the students at our school have pets," if we think our spoonful is representative enough of the whole school.
Where we teach it
Lesson 1.0 of Project 1: Sibling Interviews. Watch lesson 1.0 and read the notes, free, no account needed.
Related terms
- Sample: The part of the population we actually observe.
- Population: Everything we want to know about: the whole group our question is about.