Resource Library

This page explores Benford's Law: For naturally occurring data, the digits 1 through 9 do not have equal probability of being the first significant digit in a number; the digit 1 has greater odds of being the first significant digit than the others. This law can be used to catch tax fraud because truly random numbers used by embezzlers do not meet this condition.

This is an example of "growing" a decision tree to analyze two possible outcomes. The tree's branches examine the two possible conditions of employee drug use with corresponding probabilities. This example looks at the final outcome probabilities of being correctly and incorrectly identified versus testing accuracy.

This video is an example of what is known in psychology as selective attention. When a person is instructed to only focus on the number of times a ball is passed between players wearing a white shirt it is sometimes difficult to see what else is going on.

This webpage uses the criminal trials in the US Justice system to illustrate hypothesis testing, type I error, and type II error. An applet allows the user to examine the probability of type I errors and type II errors under various conditions. An applet allows users to visualize p-values and the power of a test. Keywords: type I error, type II error, type one error, type two error, type 1 error, type 2 error

This text document lists detailed learning objectives for introductory statistics courses. Learning objectives are brief, clear statements of what learners will be able to perform at the end of a course. These objectives were developed for a one semester general education introductory statistics course. The objectives cover the broad categories of Graphics, Summary Statistics, The Normal Distribution, Correlation and Scatterplots, Introduction to Regression, Two way Tables, Data Collection and Surveys, Basic Probability, Sampling Distributions, Confidence Intervals, Tests of Hypothesis, and T-distributions.

This lesson describes bootstrapping in the context of a statistics class for psychology students.

This short article discusses the difference between "important" and "statistically significant." The data used come from a study comparing male faculty salaries to female faculty salaries.

This short article discusses how the comparative ratios of the tails of normal distributions can result in bias in hiring practices. It contains a link to an applet that shows the comparative tail probability ratios.

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

This site is a tutorial that takes students through a mayoral election process while discussing the concept of randomness. Topics include margin of error and confidence levels.