Topic 1: Introduction to Stats
Topic #1 introduces students to the basics of statistics including types of statistical studies, levels and units of measurement in statistics, and how to assess studies that make use of statistical techniques. The main focus here is to get students accustomed to thinking about basics of variables.
Objectives
- Explain the purpose of the measures of central tendency
- Identify the three measures of central tendency
- Calculate the mode, median, and mean
- Differentiate and explain percentiles vs. percentages
- Calculate percentiles
- Explain the mathematical characteristics of the mean
- Correctly select the appropriate measure of central tendency for a given distribution of data
- Identify importance of outliers and relationship to skewness
Key Terms
- central tendency
- mode
- median
- percentiles
- mean
- outliers
- weighted mean
- symmetry
- positive skew
- negative skew
Before Class
- read Healey-Ch1
View PPT
After Class
- Answer the following questions
- How is statistics both a science and numeric data?
- What are univariate descriptive statistics?
- What are bivariate descriptive statistics?
- Practice Variable Measurement