Discovering Your Statistical Sense emphasizes discovery-based learning. Providing added context and explanation, this feature helps students deepen their understanding of statistics and apply a ‘statistical sense’ to problem-solving. This material also emphasizes student motivation by answering the question: "Why do we need to learn this stuff?"
What Do These (Numbers/Formulas/etc.) Mean? fosters an intuitive approach to interpretation of results. Whenever a new formula or statistic is being introduced, the emphasis is on "What does this really mean?" Developing this understanding is just as important as getting the right answer, especially when the software can do the calculations. In the workplace, students will need to explain to their managers what the statistical results really mean.
"What" If Scenarios help students focus on statistical thinking rather than rote computation. Because of the availability of powerful statistical computer packages, statistical analysis is easy to do badly. The wrong analysis is worse than useless and can cost companies lots of money. These scenarios are extensions of examples or exercises. In "What If" exercises, the original problem set-up is altered in a specific but non-quantifiable way. The student is then asked to think about how that change would percolate through the results, without recourse to calculations.
What Result Might We Expect?, located in example solutions, ask students to think about results in an intuitive way, while working through the calculations.
Rich variety of exercises. Discovering Statistics contains a rich and varied collection of section and chapter exercises, of three types in each section:
--Clarifying the Concepts (conceptual)
--Practicing the Techniques (skill-based)
--Applying the Concepts (real world applications)
The text includes more than 2,000 end-of-section exercises and over 800 end-of-chapter exercises.
Case Studies. A case study begins each chapter and is developed throughout the section examples, using each new set of tools that a particular section provides. The Chapter 7 (Sampling Distributions) Case Study addresses the Trial of the Pyx—a procedure held annually in London to insure that the coins of the realm contain the proper amount of gold.
Try This in Class activities promote active and cooperative learning. Appearing at the end of each chapter, these activities have students engage with each other in class, using manipulatives such as dice.
Powerful, real-world examples. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the bird flu pandemic, and the popularity of online dating represent the variety of examples included in Discovering Statistics. Example topics reflect real-world problems and engage the interest of the reader in their solution. Real data (with sources cited) is frequently used to further demonstrate relevance of topics.