Statistics Through Applications

The authors state that the book was written as a textbook in a high school course in basic statistics. In my opinion, they have hit their target. Fundamental statistics is presented at a level that can be understood by the student with a basic background in algebra and the style is one that will appeal to teenagers. A large number of cartoons are included and young adults can understand the applications. One of the problems that I occasionally have in my basic statistics class in college is an application that is difficult for the college age student to understand. For example, traditional college students do not have a great deal of experience that adults take for granted. High school students have even less experience, so great care must be taken when applications are used to illustrate the statistics. If an application is selected that is beyond the experience of the typical high school student, then they will have a difficult time understanding the statistics. To their credit, the authors use applications well within the reach of teenagers. The coverage is: *) Sampling to obtain data. *) How to design experiments. *) Data distributions. *) Scatterplots and correlation. *) Basic probability and expectation. *) Confidence intervals and inference. Which is certainly what anyone would consider a reasonable survey of the fundamentals of statistics. I strongly recommend this book for high school courses in statistics.

I am a Stats teacher who is always looking for "The Perfect Textbook" Well, this isn't it BUT I really do like this textbook. The first several chapters take the learner through the process of how data is collected. There are several activities and a couple of research problems to do. The next section talks about how to display the data and when is the best time to do what. Those first two sections are VERY well done and I honestly feel that students understand (I mean really understand) how important good data is and how easy it is to destroy good data with bad decisions. However, it is after these two sections that I would be forced to turn to another textbook. The data analysis part of this book is o-kay but nothing really to write home about. Yeah, it does a good job discussing the topics (though there really isn't enough practice problems) but it is just sorta there. Here is the formula, try it, here is the next one. Not the zip of the first 100 or so pages that is for sure. Overall, a good supplemental book that needs a solid data analysis book to go with it.