Seeing Through Statistics

It was a very reasonable price especially when compared to what my College Bookstore was asking. It contained both the CD and the IfoTrac that it advertised. It arrived promptly and even had a thank you note!

As a Professor of Statistics at UC Davis Jessica Utts has been an accomplished researcher but what sets her apart from other academic statisticians is her drive to find ways to teach statistics to the masses. She has been very active in the Statistical Education section of the ASA and has been involved as an officer and committee volunteer for the ASA for very many years now. I went to a very nice presentation she gave at the JSM in Denver this year. She write well and is an excellent lecturer as well. This book emphasizes statistical literacy and the best way to get these cocepts across to non-statisticians in an introductory course is through examples and anecdotes. This she does as well as Freedman et al in their very popular introductory statistics book.

The "search inside this book" feature was not available when this review was posted. Hope it helps. BOOK CONTENTS Part I: FINDING DATA IN LIFE. 01. The Benefits and Risks of Using Statistics. 02. Reading the News. 03. Measurements, Mistakes and Misunderstandings. 04. How to Get a Good Sample. 05. Experiments and Observational Studies. 06. Getting the Big Picture. Part II: FINDING LIFE IN DATA. 07. Summarizing and Displaying Measurement Data. 08. Bell-Shaped Curves and Other Shapes. 09. Plots, Graphs and Pictures. 10. Relationships Between Measurement Variables. 11. Relationships Can be Deceiving. 12. Relationships Between Categorical Variables. 13. Reading the Economic News. 14. Understanding and Reporting Trends Over Time. Part III: UNDERSTANDING UNCERTAINTY IN LIFE. 15. Understanding Probability and Long-Term Expectations. 16. Psychological Influences on Personal Probability. 17. When Intuition Differs from Relative Frequency. Part IV: MAKING JUDGEMENTS FROM SURVEYS AND EXPERIMENTS. 18. The Diversity of Samples from the Same Population. 19. Estimating Proportions with Confidence. 20. The Role of Confidence Intervals in Research. 21. Rejecting Chance--Testing Hypothesis in Research. 22. Hypothesis Testing--Examples and Case Studies. 23. Significance, Importance and Undetected Differences. 24. Meta-Analysis: Resolving Inconsistencies Across Studies. 25. Putting What You Have Learned to the Test. Case Studies. References. Solutions to Selected Exercises. Index.

I purchased this book to review it for a high school class in introductory statistics for enriched math students. Often mathematical subjects are criticized because they place emphasis on individual concepts, and the student doesn't learn what the concepts for used for until the end of the chapter or unit. This book places an emphasis on the research process and the role statistics plays. It is not a rigorous course in anaylsis, but better than that, it gives the newbie to statistics an understanding of the purpose of statistics. It uses cognitive strategies of elaboration and discourse to bring meaning to an otherwise abstract subject. If you plan to use this to teach, get the instructor's manual from the publisher. It has nice suggestions. Also, this is book is becoming widely used, so you may be able to find web sites where other instructors have posted ancillary readings and activities.

Hi...I used this book in an upper division math course at the University of New Mexico and loved it. It is a good book for people who need to understand and use statistics but who don't have a mathematics/statistics degree. The book emphasizes data collection techniques as well as methods of statistical calculation and ample examples are given for every topic in order to make concepts more concrete. I currently use this book as a quick reference guide and, as long as I'm not needing a rigorous development of a concept, it is perfect!