Resource Library

This exercise uses descriptive statistics to analyze a data set about how rats respond to rock music vs. classical music.

This website provides data files, examples, guides that are referenced in David Howell's textbook published in 2013. There is also a student manual and links to other useful websites.

This page provides survey data on the sexual activity of male and female subjects and discusses choosing appropriate statistics to describe the data as well as reporting bias. It also links to a Chance article about the same study.

As described in the web page itself: "This document was prepared as an illustration of the use of both t tests and correlation/regression analysis in drawing conclusions from data in an actual study." The study compares athletic performance of swimmers that are optimists vs. pessimists.

This correlation and regression example compares performance on reading comprehension questions to performace on the SAT. It also compares those who read the passage referred to by the questions to those who did not. Exercise questions and answers are also provided.

This set of exercises asks students to model relationships and test them based on the chi-square distribution. The data used is based on testosterone levels and delinquency rate of American military men.

Residual plots and other diagnostics are important to deciding whether or not linear regression is appropriate for a set of data. Many students might believe that if the correlation coefficient is strong enough, these diagnostic checks are not important. The data set included in this activity was created to lure students into a situation that looks on the surface to be appropriate for the use of linear regression but is instead based (loosely) on a quadratic function. Key words: regression, residuals

This activity provides students with 24 histograms representing distributions with differing shapes and characteristics. By sorting the histograms into piles that seem to go together, and by describing those piles, students develop awareness of the different versions of particular shapes (e.g., different types of skewed distributions, or different types of normal distributions), that not all histograms are easy to classify, that there is a difference between models (normal, uniform) and characteristics (skewness, symmetry, etc.). Key words: Histogram, shape, normal, uniform, skewed, symmetric, bimodal

This article describes an interactive activity illustrating sampling distributions for means, properties of confidence intervals, properties of hypothesis testing, confidence intervals for means, and hypothesis tests for means. Students generate and analyze data and through simulation explore these concepts. The activity is completed in three parts. The three parts of the activity can be used in sequence or they can be used individually as "stand alone" activities. This allows the educator flexibility in utilizing the activity. Part I illustrates the sampling distribution of the sample mean. Part II illustrates confidence intervals for the population mean. Part III illustrates hypothesis tests for the population mean. This activity is appropriate for use in an introductory college or high school AP statistics course. Key words: sampling distribution of a sample mean, confidence interval for a mean, hypothesis test on a mean, simulation, random rectangles

Lisp-Stat is an extensible statistical computing environment for data analysis, statistical instruction and research, with an emphasis on providing a framework for exploring the use of dynamic graphical methods. The object-oriented programming system is also used as the basis for statistical model representations, such as linear and nonlinear regression models and generalized linear models. Many aspects of the system design were motivated by the S language.