When
you meet a new person, it is hard to know what to expect. You may not
be able to read the person or understand what they mean. Even if you
want to have a good relationship with them, this lack of understanding
can make interactions tense, unpredictable and scary! The same is true
for a lot of people as they encounter statistics and mathematical ways
of working with data. Statistics can be confusing and opaque. Symbols,
Greek letters, very large and very small numbers, and how to interpret
all of this can leave to feeling cold and disengaged—even fearful and
resentful.
But in the modern information age, having a healthy relationship with
statistics can make life a whole lot easier. We are constantly faced
with an onslaught of data and claims about it—from news articles, to
Facebook and blog posts, casual and professional conversations, reports
at our workplace, advertising, and claims from politicians and public
officials. How can we process that information, make sense of it,
evaluate truth claims, and put ourselves in a position to act on the
information? One of the most important ways is by befriending statistics
and consistently using statistical ways of thinking.
The purpose of this course, then is to help you develop a functional,
satisfying, and useful life-long relationship with statistics. To
achieve that goal, we will take a non-technical approach—you will learn
how statistics work and why they are so helpful in evaluating the world
of information that is around us. You will learn about the logic of
statistical thinking and the concepts (rather than the mathematical
details and probability theory) that guide statistical inferences and
conclusions.
You do not need to be a math whiz to take this course. If you can
add, subtract, multiply, and divide (or just be able to use a calculator
to do that!), you will be more than able to handle what will happen as
this relationship develops.
By the end of the course you will be able to:
- Identify the most important features of a data set
- Select a statistical test based on the features of the data
- Think like a statistical detective
- Understand the relationship between two different characteristics or variables
- Perform some simple statistical calculations and draw some conclusions from real data
- Hopefully, love stats!
We’ll do all of this using entertaining examples related to real-life situations we all encounter in everyday life.
