Introduction and contents ............................................................................................. 2
Module overview ..................................................................................................... 2
Contents ................................................................................................................... 4
Do this .................................................................................................................. 5
Try this ................................................................................................................. 5
Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................... 5
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The materials listed below are presented on the following pages of this unit in pdf format.
MDST242 US Update Supplement;
MDST242 A0 Introduction;
MDST242 A1 Prices;
MDST242 A2 Earnings;
MDST242 A3 Surveys;
MDST242 A4 Relationships;
MDST242 A5 Review;
MDST242 B1 Truancy;
MDST242 B2 Class size;
MDST242 B3 Reading aloud;
MDST242 B4 Factors affecting reading;
MDST242 B5 Review;
MDST242 C1 Testing new drugs;
MDST242 C2 Scientific experiments;
MDST242 C3 Is my child normal?;
MDST242 C4 Smoking, statistics and society;
MDST242 C5 Review.
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This material is taken from a discontinued Open University course. It is intended for re-purposing and re-use by educators rather than for use directly by learners.
Learning outcomes appropriate to the original course may be provided within the material, but it is intended that educators will construct new learning outcomes appropriate to the re-use they make of this material.
This course was presented for the last time in February 2006. The course materials covers statistical information and the ways of dealing with it, playing an
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increasingly important part in our lives. This course offers an uncomplicated yet critical introduction to current (2006) statistical ideas and practice, and demonstrates a variety of applications of statistics in everyday life. Statistical concepts are introducted to help make sense of practical problems and to help answer such questions as: ‘Are we becoming better off?’ and ‘Is my child developing normally?’
The course was intended for anyone who is interested in statistics and how it affects everyday life, and should be useful to those who need a basic understanding of statistics for their work or for studies in other disciplines. A single course cannot cover the whole range of statistical techniques, but this course should give an intuitive understanding of the principles of using statistics and so help you to assimilate new statistical techniques when you meet them in other contexts.
The course begins with an introduction to some basic ideas about statistics and various ways of presenting numerical information. Then come three sections, each ten weeks’ work, consisting of teaching texts followed by a review. Each review summarises the statistical ideas developed in the section and illustrates how they can be applied to various problems. We look at topics such as development aid, home insulation, plant ecology and psychology.
The first section asks ‘Are we becoming better off?’ In this broad economic context we develop ways of exploring batches of statistical data. Methods of summarising data, graphical representation of data and relationships between different quantities are all discussed. We investigate the process of obtaining data to do with pay, prices and other variables from sample surveys, and look briefly at some aspects of official statistics.
The next section looks at education. Many important ideas in statistics are concerned with inference – drawing conclusions from data. We develop the basic concepts of statistical inference in the context of questions like ‘Does class size affect performance?’ and ‘How effective is parental help for children’s learning?’
We discuss the statistical concepts of probability, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing and the normal distribution.
The last section investigates medicine and health. Experiments are important in many fields of knowledge, and it is often necessary to use statistical ideas at the planning stage of an experiment, so that the information obtained is as useful as it can be. We look at some of these ideas and their application in testing new drugs.
You will have an opportunity to carry out a simple experiment and analyse the results from it (you need no special equipment for this).
Finally, we look at the relevance of statistics to personal and public decision making by investigating questions about children’s development and about the relationship between smoking and lung disease.
The original course was supported with audio/visual materials and tutor support, these resources are not provided here. Please see contents list for the details of the text materials provided for this course.
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Suggested study hours 200
Format PDF for 17 books
Click 'View document' below to open file Update Supplement (PDF, 11 pages, 0.5
MB).
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Click 'View document' below to open file Introduction (PDF, 66 pages, 3.7 MB).
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Click 'View document' below to open file Prices (PDF, 66 pages, 3.0 MB).
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Click 'View document' below to open file Earnings (PDF, 58 pages, 3.2 MB).
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Click 'View document' below to open file Introduction (PDF, 50 pages, 3.7 MB).
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Click 'View document' below to open file Relationships (PDF, 66 pages, 3.0 MB).
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Click 'View document' below to open file Review (PDF, 34 pages, 2.2 MB).
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Click 'View document' below to open file Truancy (PDF, 66 pages, 2.9 MB).
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Click 'View document' below to open file Class size (PDF, 70 pages, 3.4 MB).
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Click 'View document' below to open file Reading aloud (PDF, 58 pages, 2.8 MB).
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Click 'View document' below to open file Factors affecting reading (PDF, 70 pages,
3.2 MB).
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View document
Click 'View document' below to open file Review (PDF, 46 pages, 2.9 MB).
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Click 'View document' below to open file Testing new drugs (PDF, 50 pages, 4.5
MB).
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Click 'View document' below to open file Scientific experiments (PDF, 50 pages,
4.9 MB).
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Click 'View document' below to open file Is my child normal? (PDF, 42 pages, 4.5
MB).
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Click 'View document' below to open file Smoking, statistics and society (PDF, 46 pages, 4.6 MB).
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Click 'View document' below to open file Review (PDF, 30 pages, 2.5 MB).
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This material is taken from The Open University's OpenLearn website. OpenLearn provides free open educational resources for learners and educators around the world under a Creative Commons licence. Third party materials have been removed but for ease of use the original acknowledgements copy has been included. For the online version of this unit and for other free educational resources across a range of topics, please go to http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/home.php.
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