Introduction to Statistics
These are screenshots from Introduction to Statistics, a friendly program using graphics and sound to explain the most important ideas in basic statistics. There are questions to check that material is understood and additional explanations if you meet difficulties. At every stage, you can consult a built-in textbook or look up technical terms in an interactive glossary.
The whole program – equivalent to a one-year introductory statistics course at high school or university, and including three integrated e-books, costs – only £15 (UK pounds) for a lifetime licence on one computer.
The program is in three sections, Research Methods, Descriptive Statistics and Inferential Statistics (though all three are downloaded and installed in a single operation). Each of these includes an on-screen textbook that covers the same material in a different way with extra detail, more examples and different exercises.
As you work through the program,
you can click on a button in the lower
left of any screen to see what the corresponding textbook says about the topic.
In addition, some screens have a clickable blue rectangle, reading
when the information in the book is likely to be particularly useful.
If you wish, you can read right through the textbook from beginning to end or use its index to look up a particular topic. When you exit from the book, you return to the program at the point where you left it.
Click any of the books to see its contents and opening pages.
This is the menu of eight sections that we see when the program starts. Clicking any of these opens up further menus until the teaching material is reached.
Introduction to Statistics covers all that most people need to conduct and interpret basic research and deal intelligently with the resulting data. For those who will go further, it gives a thorough grounding. It is used in courses from High-School to Postgraduate level in schools, colleges and universities in many countries
Note that it is a teaching program that explains principles and methods for handling data but does not carry out calculations on your own data. Note also that to use it, you need a computer running Microsoft Windows.
Let's consider the content of a typical section. If we click on Section 4, Correlation and association, we bring up its menu. (The background is the same colour for all menus and teaching screens in a section and also shows the section number so it's easy to tell where you are in the program.)
This section menu offers four choices that we can view in any order, but would usually view in menu order. The first always gives a general orientation to the topic, with a title that is often a question.
The final subsection is a set of test questions to check that the concepts in Section 4 have been grasped. Clicking on a subsection may bring you to some teaching material or may reveal a further menu of topics. Clicking on, What is correlation? brings up the first screen of Section 4.
The first three screens introduce the basic idea of a relationship between two variables, here weight and waist measurement, but without using any numbers. Numbers come later.
The notion of predicting the size of one variable when the size of a related variable is known, is illustrated in the following screen. Since there is some relationship between waist measurement and weight, even though it is far from exact, the mean weight of people within various ranges of waist measurement is seen to rise along with their mean waist size. The animation here is automatic but in the program you contol it with your mouse.
In a similar way, and still without any maths at all, the idea of a correlation coefficient describing the degree of relationship between variables is introduced intuitively as early as screen 4. The demonstration here runs automatically but in the program you can manipulate the slider to change the closeness of the relationship.
By moving the slider, you simultaneously control the degree of association shown in the scatter plot and the numerical correlation coefficent, r, describing that degree of relationship. Without any calculation, this shows what a correlation coefficient tells you about an association between variables.
Throughout the program, there is a strong emphasis on conveying concepts in an intuitive way so that the essentials are learned first.