LESSON: Collecting Data

In this lesson, we're going to continue our focus on the question:

What is the average starting salary for graduates majoring in petroleum engineering?

In past assignments, we have used sample data to calculate a sample mean that would approximate the population mean through inferential statistics. However, moving forward, we will learn how to use multiple sample means to help us construct an interval of values that would capture the population mean. We can feel more confident that we have captured the true population mean when we state an interval estimate, rather than when we state a single point estimate.