Resource Library

Because surveys are increasingly common in the medical literature, readers need to be able to critically evaluate the survey method. Two questions are fundamental: 1) Who do the respondents represent? 2) What do their answers mean? This lecture example discusses survey sampling terms and aspects of interpreting survey results.

This NSF funded project provides worksheets and laboratories for introductory statistics. The overview page contains links to 9 worksheets that can be done without technology, which address the topics of obtaining data, summarizing data, probability, regression and correlation, sampling distributions, hypothesis testing and confidence intervals. The page also contains twelve laboratories that require the use of technology. Data sets are provided in Minitab format.

Song calls for the importance of chance, juxtaposed a variety of statistical terms. May be sung to the tune of "Give Peace a Chance" (John Lennon). Musical accompaniment realization and vocals are by Joshua Lintz from University of Texas at El Paso.

A cartoon to teach how it is important to look at variation, not just averages. Cartoon by John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea from Dennis Pearl (The Ohio State University). Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites.

An interactive box plot applet that allows users to put in their own data that is part of a large collection of platform independent, interactive, java applets and activities for K-12 mathematics and teacher education.

This tutorial introduces the statistical software SPSS for Windows users. Topics covered include: The Basics, Data, Descriptive Statistics, Chi-square & T-tests, Correlations & Regression, Oneway ANOVA, Factorial ANOVA.

This page provides distribution calculators for the binomial, normal, Student's T, Chi-square, and Fisher's F distributions. Users set the parameters and enter either the probability or the test statistic and the calculators return the missing value.

This applet demonstrates the Central Limit Theorem. First, select a distribution (Normal, Uniform, Skewed, Custom) and add or delete data points by clicking on the graph. Then, sample from the parent population and the distribution of the sample mean is shown. Users can also choose to see the distribution of the median, standard deviation, variance, and range.

This applet demonstrates the Normal approximation to the Poisson Distribution. Users can set the rate, lambda (‘é), and the number of trials, n, and observe how the shape of the distribution changes. The Poisson distribution is shown in blue, and the Normal distribution is shown in red.

This applet introduces the concept of confidence intervals. Select an alpha level, sample size, and the number of experiments, and click "Play." For each sample, the applet will show the data points as blue dots and the confidence interval as a red, vertical line. The true population mean is shown as a horizontal purple line, and green ovals indicate which intervals do not contain the true mean.