Education 200C

Introduction to Statistical Methods in Education

Fall Quarter, 2012

Course Text

Welkowitz, J., Cohen, B. & Ewen, R. Introductory Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences. 7th Edition. John Wiley & Sons.

STATA (not required but recommended).

Course Description

The primary objective of the course is to introduce you to the basic concepts in descriptive and inferential statistics as applied to educational research, and to prepare you for subsequent statistical courses in multivariate statistics and beyond. (If you do not intend on taking subsequent statistics courses in Winter and Spring quarters, you should register for Education 150). This course begins with methods to describe and summarize frequency distributions and relationships between distributions, using Pearson's r as a starting point. This is followed by various methods to describe the relationships between two or more variables. Finally, we provide an introduction to probability theory methods to draw inferences about the relationship between samples used in studies to the universe from which the samples were drawn. You will also be introduced to a statistical software program, STATA. You are required to concurrently take the workshop course on STATA (Education 401B) unless you are already familiar with it. This course is meant to be informative and fun (yes, fun!), and we guarantee everyone that after this course, you will want to know more, and that statistical thinking will forever change the way that you view the world.

Homework exercises. Most weeks, you will be given problems posted on this website to complete. We very much encourage you to do these problems in groups so that you can have a chance to discuss them and pose questions. You should come to the discussion section held on Fridays with your answers. The sections will discuss the problems and answers, and you may annotate your homework answer during the sections, at the end of which you will be asked to hand them in. Each homework will be graded as pass/no pass, but the primary intent of the homework is to assess your on-going learning and to guide our own instructional efforts. So, on your homework sheets, please feel free to include questions and comments that can help us teach you better.

Exams. There will be two open-book exams during the course, with computational and conceptual problems similar to those found in the homework problems, as well as conceptual questions.

Grading. This course will be letter-grade only. The final grade will consist of the following: 25% midterm exam; 25% final exam; 50% homework.

Note: this is a live site that will continuously change and grow as the quarter moves along. To see where last year's site ended up, click here.