About

Course Objectives: By the end of this course, students will be able to:

• Explain how research methods and statistics affect your professional domain
• Differentiate between descriptive and inferential statistics
• Identify and calculate the basic statistical
• Select and apply appropriate statistical techniques and tools
• Describe the rationale and procedure for statistical analyses
• Critically read and interpret the basic results of statistical studies

Course Description:

The purpose of this course is to provide students with the basic tools and techniques needed to conduct, analyze, and interpret statistics in order to make informed decisions.

The course content is divided into three main sections.

1. The first section focuses on descriptive statistics including definitions and terminology, understanding experimental design, organizing and presenting data, and calculating measures of central tendency, variability, and position.
2. The following section presents the concept of probability, covering such topics as probability theory, methods of counting, calculating simple and compound events, probability distributions, conditional probabilities, and the normal distribution.
3. The last section of the course explores inferential statistics including the rationale and procedure to conduct hypothesis tests. Students will use learn to use sample data to make decisions about a given population (with large and small data sets), deal with dependent means and independent means testing, and will be introduced to the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) technique. Lastly, students will explore linear relationships between variables and predict outcomes using correlation and regression analysis.

Online Course:

This course will be taught online during the Winter '20 semester.

There will be a weekly check in component (via ZOOM online ~ approximately 1 hr.) You will be given a choice of picking a 1 hr. session from 2 different available times.

We will decide this during our first online session. More details to follow in late Fall.

The course while challenging will be fun, practical, and rewarding :)

The course is currently divided into three main parts:

1. Introduction & Descriptive Statistics:
   • Review of basic math (appendix A) ~ week 0
   • An Introduction to Statistics and Research Design (chapter 1 ~ wk. 1)
   • Frequency Distributions (chapter 2 ~ wk. 2)
   • Visual Displays of Data (chapter 3 ~ wk. 2/3)
   • Central Tendency and Variability (chapter 4 ~wk. 3)
2. Setting the Stage (Foundations of Inferential Statistics)
   • Sampling and Probability (chapter 5 ~ wk. 4)
   • The Normal Curve, Standardization, and Z Scores (chapter 6 ~ wk 5)
   • Hypothesis Testing with z Tests (chapter 7 ~ wk 6)
   • Confidence Intervals, Effect Size, and Statistical Power (chapter 8 ~ wk. 7)
3. Putting it all Together (Exploring Inferential Statistics)
   • The Single-Samples t Test & Paired-Samples t Test (chapter 9 ~ wk. 8)
   • The Independent-Samples t Test (chapter 10 ~ wk. 9)
   • One-Way ANOVA (chapter 11 ~ wk. 10)
   • Two-Way Between-Groups ANOVA (chapter 12 ~ wk. 11)
   • Correlation & Regression (chapter 13 & 14 ~ wk. 12)
   • Chi Squares (chapter 15 ~ wk. 13) * optional depending where we are re: correlation & regression

This is a very ambitious schedule for a one semester course but we are confident we will be successful !