Descriptive Statistics (revised)

This section usually begins any course in statistics. For many students, it is a rehash of information learned in earlier grades. While most of the exercises in The Practice of Statistics are adequate for teaching students the essence of describing data, there are a number of new exercises in this section that emphasize analysis of live data sets and making conclusions in a succinct manner. This is a skill that students need develop as it uses reading and writing as well as analysis.

The Taxi assignment in this section is quite interesting to students and allows them to see that describing data is more than finding the mean, median, and mode. And the McDonalds assignment uses a real news story to challenge students to use Normal distributions to plead a case to a jury.

The student version of Descriptive Stats is free and can be downloaded below.

Contents of the Descriptive Statistics Material

Cover page: For each of the sections, I have a cover page that describes the material and what it includes. I suggest that you read it for each section. Material that is new or revised I indicated in red.

Overview. These are generally booklets or description pages where there are no problems to solve. For instance, we have one booklet on all aspects of the calculator.  Since there are no solutions, the Overview file is located only in the student version. The contents are described in the cover pages.

Teaching. These are documents that the teacher uses for face-to-face teaching. It walks students through a process like doing regression or a hypothesis test. There are several problems that teachers will do with the students in class and homework problem, found in the exercises mimic them. The contents of the teaching packet are described in the cover pages.

Exercises.  This is the bulk of the material. It contains homework problems, quizzes, and exams, and simulations to try. In the Inference section, there are two exercise files because of the great number of concepts taught. The contents of the exercise packet are described in the cover pages.