Sometimes it is hard to both collect and display information about a topic. One way to make this easier is to use a frequency distribution table. A frequency distribution table is a way of showing how often an event takes place.

Frequency means the number of times something happened.

Here's an example of a frequency distribution table.

You will look closely at how to build a frequency table in this activity.

Let's say that your teacher wanted you to find out the most common amount of hours students slept each night. You could go out and interview students and just write down their answers. This would be easy if you only had to ask five students, but what if you had to ask 100 students?

It wouldn't look very neat and tidy if you had 100 random numbers written down and it would take a long time to organize the numbers. Instead, you could make up a frequency table before you interviewed students.

A frequency distribution table has three columns:

Notice that on the chart above, the information column says what you are studying, in this case it is the number of hours slept. The second column is the space in which you keep track of your answers with ticks or check marks, and the last column is simply a place to write down how many ticks are in the second column. Now that you have created a chart to put your information on, it is time to start the survey.

The first student you ask answers that they sleep four hours per night. You would put a tick in the tally column beside 4 – 5.

You would keep doing this until you have asked the desired number of students. Let's say you needed to ask 20 students. Your tally might look like this:

The last step is to fill in the frequency column. You simply write down the number of ticks you have in the tally column in the frequency column like this:

You now have a chart that is easy to read! If your teacher asks, "What is the most common number of hours slept by students?" all you have to do is look at the frequency column, find the largest number, and go across to the first column. In this case, you would answer 6 – 7 hours.