My objective is to provide both an understanding of, and hands-on experience with basic, data-centric statistics. This class is similar to a regular statistics class except that we focus the application of statistics on examples of actual studies from a wide array of biological interests: from biomedical studies and pharmacology, to ecology, genetics, physiology and related socio-economic questions.
By the end of this course, you should be able to analyze and present data, design observational and experimental studies, use probabilities to model and predict random events, and use inference procedures to test hypotheses and estimate population parameters to reach conclusions in context. What you learn in this class should help you understand broadly the methodology, results, and issues of studies presented in your other classes or in news stories. I also hope that you will come to appreciate statistics as a cool and really interesting subject.
Note that STATS 8 satisfies the General Education requirement for Category Va, Quantitative Literacy, with the following learning outcome objectives: Students should be able to
1) Identify appropriate tools for quantitative analysis of processes or events.
2) Have a basic familiarity with fundamental principles underlying quantitative descriptions of natural or social processes.
3) Be able to do one or more of the following: evaluate studies and reports that assess risk and probability in everyday life; use models of natural phenomena to make quantitative predictions of future behavior or events; use models of economic and social structures to make quantitative predictions of future behavior or events.
- Descriptive statistics
- Correlation and regression
- Random samples and experimental design
- Probability rules
- Normal distributions
- Sampling distributions
- Confidence intervals for means
- Hypothesis tests for means
- Analysis of variance
- Chi-square tests
Lectures present the core material of this class, illustrated with examples. You are strongly encouraged to check the corresponding chapter section(s) out of the textbook BEFORE attending lectures. This greatly enhances the learning process. Lecture topics and corresponding book chapters are posted weekly on the Lectures page. Always bring your iclicker/REEF to class and bring your graphing calculator (or emulator) to lectures involving computations. We use the calculator to work out examples together during class and the iclicker/REEF system to foster two-way communication and engaged participation.
Discussion sections provide an opportunity to practice exercises and ask questions. Attendance is not mandatory but it is recorded and earns participation points for active work. Details of participation credit is provided in the Grades section of the syllabus specific to your quarter.
All computations for this class are done using technology (statistical software, graphing calculator).
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