Free Supplementary Textbooks:
• Howell, D. C. (2012). Statistical Methods for Psychology. Cengage Learning. http://gtu.ge/Agro- Lib/Howle.pdf (well written and useful, heavy on formulas and hand calculation, little support for SPSS)
• Graphing Distributions in Lane’s Online Statistics Education: An Interactive Multimedia Course of Study at http://onlinestatbook.com/2/index.html or https://openstax.org/details/introductory- statistics
• Tyrrell, S. (2009). SPSS: Stats practically short and simple. Bookboon. Freely downloadable at https://oerstatistics.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/stats-practically-short-and-simple.pdf (This book is nice for a walk-through of the basic steps in data handling, data entry, and other “basic laboratory practices” or “basic office practices”. It is a good reference for a variety of details we might not cover directly in class and should help answer a variety of questions about how to work with data and analyses.)
Syllabus Psychology 301 Statistical Methods 3
• Fay, D. S., & Gerow, K. A biologist’s guide to statistical thinking and analysis. WormBook: the online review of C. elegans biology. http://www.wormbook.org/chapters/www_statisticalanalysis/statisticalanalysis.html (We include this as an example of a very condensed overview of basic statistics)
Assignment:
Explain your understanding of hypothesis testing and the Type 1 and Type 2 errors. Use an example from your own life or work to illustrate the concepts. Use that example to address the following ideas noted in section 8.2 of your text.
* Step 1: State the hypotheses by listing your null hypothesis and alternative hypothesis
* Step 2: Set the criteria for a decision
* Step 3: Compute the test statistic
* Step 4: Make a decision.
Explain a situation in life where someone presented you with an argument based on a biased sample (e.g. cherry picking observations, etc.)
* What happened in this scenario?
* How did you handle it?
* What does this tell us about sampling and making public arguments?
Your main post should be at least 300 words with one reference
