Awarded the 2019 Most Promising New Textbook Award by the Textbook & Academic Authors Association. This accessible and entertaining new textbook provides students with the knowledge and skills they need to understand the barrage of numbers encountered in their everyday lives and studies. Almost all the statistics in the news, on social media or in scientific reports are based on just a few core concepts, including measurement (ensuring we count the right thing), causation (determining whether one thing causes another) and sampling (using just a few people to understand a whole population). By explaining these concepts in plain language, without complex mathematics, this book prepares students to meet the statistical world head on and to begin their own quantitative research projects. Ideal for students facing statistical research for the first time, or for anyone interested in understanding more about the numbers in the news, this textbook helps students to see beyond the headlines and behind the numbers.
Awarded the 2019 Most Promising New Textbook Award by the Textbook & Academic Authors Association. This accessible and entertaining new textbook provides students with the knowledge and skills they need to understand the barrage of numbers encountered in their everyday lives and studies. Almost all the statistics in the news, on social media or in scientific reports are based on just a few core concepts, including measurement (ensuring we count the right thing), causation (determining whether one thing causes another) and sampling (using just a few people to understand a whole population). By explaining these concepts in plain language, without complex mathematics, this book prepares students to meet the statistical world head on and to begin their own quantitative research projects. Ideal for students facing statistical research for the first time, or for anyone interested in understanding more about the numbers in the news, this textbook helps students to see beyond the headlines and behind the numbers.
Holistic approach to understanding medical statistics This hands-on guide is much more than a basic medical statistics introduction. It equips you with the statistical tools required for evidence-based clinical research. Each chapter provides a clear step-by-step guide to each statistical test with practical instructions on how to generate and interpret the numbers, and present the results as scientific tables or graphs. Showing you how to: analyse data with the help of data set examples (Click here to download datasets) select the correct statistics and report results for publication or presentation understand and critically appraise results reported in the literature Each statistical test is linked to the research question and the type of study design used. There are also checklists for critically appraising the literature and web links to useful internet sites. Clear and concise explanations, combined with plenty of examples and tabulated explanations are based on the authors’ popular medical statistics courses. Critical appraisal guidelines at the end of each chapter help the reader evaluate the statistical data in their particular contexts.
Research Methods and Statistics provides a seamless introduction to the subject, identifying various research areas and analyzing how one can approach them statistically. The text provides a solid empirical foundation for undergraduate psychology majors, and prepares the reader to think critically, and evaluate psychological research and claims they might hear in the news or popular press. The text can be used in all statistics, methods and experimental psychology courses.
Winner of the National Business Book Award From the New York Times bestselling author of The Organized Mind and This Is Your Brain on Music, a primer to the critical thinking that is more necessary now than ever We are bombarded with more information each day than our brains can process—especially in election season. It's raining bad data, half-truths, and even outright lies. New York Times bestselling author Daniel J. Levitin shows how to recognize misleading announcements, statistics, graphs, and written reports, revealing the ways lying weasels can use them. It's becoming harder to separate the wheat from the digital chaff. How do we distinguish misinformation, pseudo-facts, and distortions from reliable information? Levitin groups his field guide into two categories—statistical information and faulty arguments—ultimately showing how science is the bedrock of critical thinking. Infoliteracy means understanding that there are hierarchies of source quality and bias that variously distort our information feeds via every media channel, including social media. We may expect newspapers, bloggers, the government, and Wikipedia to be factually and logically correct, but they so often aren't. We need to think critically about the words and numbers we encounter if we want to be successful at work, at play, and in making the most of our lives. This means checking the plausibility and reasoning—not passively accepting information, repeating it, and making decisions based on it. Readers learn to avoid the extremes of passive gullibility and cynical rejection. Levitin's charming, entertaining, accessible guide can help anyone wake up to a whole lot of things that aren't so. And catch some weasels in their tracks!
Critical Thinking examines how we make judgments under uncertainty and how various biases can distort our consideration of evidence. Via everyday examples, Varda Liberman and Amos Tversky explore the insights of probability, causal relationships, and making inferences from samples with the goal of helping readers improve their intuitive reasoning.
A syllabus-specific textbook providing worked examples, exam-level questions and many practice exercises, in accordance to the new Edexcel AS and Advanced GCE specification.
Statistics is confusing, even for smart, technically competent people. And many students and professionals find that existing books and web resources don’t give them an intuitive understanding of confusing statistical concepts. That is why this book is needed. Some of the unique qualities of this book are: • Easy to Understand: Uses unique “graphics that teach” such as concept flow diagrams, compare-and-contrast tables, and even cartoons to enhance “rememberability.” • Easy to Use: Alphabetically arranged, like a mini-encyclopedia, for easy lookup on the job, while studying, or during an open-book exam. • Wider Scope: Covers Statistics I and Statistics II and Six Sigma Black Belt, adding such topics as control charts and statistical process control, process capability analysis, and design of experiments. As a result, this book will be useful for business professionals and industrial engineers in addition to students and professionals in the social and physical sciences. In addition, each of the 60+ concepts is covered in one or more articles. The 75 articles in the book are usually 5–7 pages long, ensuring that things are presented in “bite-sized chunks.” The first page of each article typically lists five “Keys to Understanding” which tell the reader everything they need to know on one page. This book also contains an article on “Which Statistical Tool to Use to Solve Some Common Problems”, additional “Which to Use When” articles on Control Charts, Distributions, and Charts/Graphs/Plots, as well as articles explaining how different concepts work together (e.g., how Alpha, p, Critical Value, and Test Statistic interrelate). ANDREW A. JAWLIK received his B.S. in Mathematics and his M.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Michigan. He held jobs with IBM in marketing, sales, finance, and information technology, as well as a position as Process Executive. In these jobs, he learned how to communicate difficult technical concepts in easy - to - understand terms. He completed Lean Six Sigma Black Belt coursework at the IASSC - accredited Pyzdek Institute. In order to understand the confusing statistics involved, he wrote explanations in his own words and graphics. Using this material, he passed the certification exam with a perfect score. Those statistical explanations then became the starting point for this book.
Understanding and Evaluating Research: A Critical Guide shows students how to be critical consumers of research and to appreciate the power of methodology as it shapes the research question, the use of theory in the study, the methods used, and how the outcomes are reported. The book starts with what it means to be a critical and uncritical reader of research, followed by a detailed chapter on methodology, and then proceeds to a discussion of each component of a research article as it is informed by the methodology. The book encourages readers to select an article from their discipline, learning along the way how to assess each component of the article and come to a judgment of its rigor or quality as a scholarly report.
