Many students view statistics as a requirement – an obstacle to be overcome on their journey. Statistics are not an obstacle but rather a common language that will speed you along. You’ll need this language in order to understand what others are saying and to tell your story more forcefully and more authoritatively. It is the common language that unites all disciplines in the natural sciences and social sciences.
This is why we created this course – passion-driven statistics. It is statistics in the service of your research – in the service of your passion. In this course you’ll be conducting original research, asking original questions, and communicating your methods and results using the language of statistics. This is not an academic exercise but rather an opportunity to create new knowledge and to share this understanding with others. It is an opportunity to further your passion
This website serves the developers of Passion-Driven Statistics Phase II. Anyone interested in teaching or learning statistics may find this useful.
For this course you will be working with data that already exists. We’ve chosen a number of data sets that contain vast amounts of information covering health, drug use, geography, space science and more. From these data sets you’ll be able to pose questions of interest to you and then use statistical computation software to turn raw data into useful information.
For this course you’ll be using SAS studio software online and you’ll be writing and running your own programs.For some of you who’ve never written code before this may seem daunting. But don’t worry because there’ll be a lot of support, and remember, this is statistics in the service of research. Your research always comes first.
SAS (Statistical Analysis System) is a software suite developed by SAS Institute for advanced analytics, multivariate analyses, business intelligence, data management, and predictive analytics. SAS was developed at North Carolina State University from 1966 until 1976, when SAS Institute was incorporated. Click to view SAS Films
R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is a GNU project which is similar to the S language and environment which was developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues.
Stata is a general-purpose statistical analysis package created and maintained by StataCorp LP. Its capabilities include a broad range of statistical analyses, plus data management, graphics, simulations, and custom programming