Welcome to SDS 220¶
I am so excited that you’ll be joining this educational journey through statistics! You are now, just by being here, a statistician. This course will help us frame out exactly what that means and also what statistics is.
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You are now a statistician!
Official Course Description¶
An application-oriented introduction to modern statistical inference: study design, descriptive statistics; random variables; probability and sampling distributions; point and interval estimates; hypothesis tests, resampling procedures and multiple regression. A wide variety of applications from the natural and social sciences are used. Classes meet for lecture/discussion and for a required laboratory that emphasizes analysis of real data. SDS 220 satisfies the basic requirement for biological science, engineering, environmental science, neuroscience and psychology.
Motivating Questions¶
There are a few questions motivating our course work:
What is Statistics?
What role does data play in statistics?
What habits of mind do we need to develop to be effective and ethical statisticians?
Course Learning Objectives¶
By the end of the course, statisticians (ie. you!) will be able to…
Responsibly use sample data to learn about a larger population, using exploratory and inferential statistics - Create Statistics
Detail the power and limitations of statistical concepts, and use this understanding to evaluate statistics from various contexts - Evaluate Statistics
Explain the connection between probability and inferential statistics - Connect Statistical Concepts
Work collaboratively, responsibly, and reflectively to create and present statistics to a wide variety of audiences - Communicate with Statistics
Syllabus¶
This webpage and the associated links together function as the syllabus. Everything that you need to know about the course is either here or linked from here.
The course syllabus is the most important document underlying the culture of our course and our classroom. I view my syllabus as a sacred document that both introduces and governs the course. In taking this view, I work to detail as much about the course as possible from the big picture ideas to the minute details of course policies. I believe that the first activity a student should do when beginning a course is to carefully read and examine the syllabus. In keeping with that belief, there are a few tasks in this document that will help us build our course community.
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Please read the syllabus this week and complete these tasks to help shape our community. If you have questions about the syllabus, please ask them!
Course Acknowledgements¶
Parts of this course - including slides, activities, and notes - will be from a variety of sources. Materials will be appropriately attributed and will be used in keeping with copyright and fair use laws.