Resource Library

Chance News reviews current issues in the news that use probability or statistical concepts. Its aim is to give the general public a better understanding of chance news as reported by the media and to allow teachers of probability and statistics courses to liven up their courses with current chance news.

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.

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 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.

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

This exercise includes a discussion on comparing data with very different sample sizes and nonhomogeneity of variance. The data comes from a study on the behavior of pregnant women with regard to cigarette smoking.

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.

Users can select from detailed tables and geographical comparison tables to generate data from the 2000 Census.

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.

Using a parameter it's possible to represent a property of an entire population with a single number instead of millions of individual data points. There are a number of possible parameters to choose from such as the median, mode, or interquartile range. Each is calculated in a different manner and illuminates the data from a different point of view. The mean is one of the most useful and widely used and helps us understand populations. A population is simulated by generating 10,000 floating point random numbers between 0 and 10. Sample means are displayed in histograms and analyzed.