Statistics

Please see "Course Documents" below for all course handouts, presentations, homework assignments. The folder also contains a running list of homework assignments, project deadlines, and test dates.

Is a specific medical treatment effective? Are students who take a high school statistics course more likely to have a higher GPA in college compared to those who do not? Statistics gives us tools to answer these questions. In this course, we will focus on how statistics gives us tools to “read” and to “write” the world. When we “read the world,” we use statistics to understand the world around us. Our understanding leads us to “write the world,” meaning that we recognize how we can make decisions to affect change and to be a part of solutions.

To these ends, we will focus on doing statistics, using existing datasets and, at times, collecting our own data. We will study the statistical concepts that allow us to collect data and the tools that allow us to describe and analyze data. Once we have collected and analyzed the data, we ask ourselves, “So what?” and then draw conclusions based on the data. By knowing this process, we can become wise and critical consumers of statistics. We also recognize the beauty in statistics: it is a collection of tools and concepts that allow us to try to find certainty in an uncertain world.

Essential Questions:

• How can we read and write the world with statistics? / How can we use statistics to understand the world and to motivate change?

• How can we become wise consumers of statistics?