Resource Library

This one-page document gives some helpful tips about the first day of class. It gives short advice on creating a first impression, establishing rapport, clarifying expectations, collecting information and building excitement.

This one-page document gives advice on how to construct and give exams. It focuses on making exams a positive experience for both instructors and students. It is written by Rich Felder an expert in Engineering education.

This one-page document gives advice on how to handle large classes. Specific items it examines include creating an interactive lecture, handing out of class assignments, and miscellaneous tips. It is written by Rich Felder an expert in Engineering education.

This applet allows students to manipulate a histogram and observe changes in the mean and median. The site includes links to exercises and descriptions of measures of center and spread.

This applet demonstrates probability as the area under the normal and the standard normal curves. Students can manipulate mean, standard deviation, and lower and upper bounds to find probabilities.

This simulation applet shows groups of confidence intervals for a given alpha based on a standard normal distribution. It shows how changes in alpha affect the proportion of confidence intervals that contain the mean. An article and an alternative source for this applet can be found at http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v6n3/applets/confidenceinterval.html.

This applet allows you to explore the validity of confidence intervals on a proportion with various values for sample size (N) and population proportion (Pi). After you specify N, Pi, the level of confidence, and the number of simulations you wish to perform, the applet samples data according to your specification and computes a confidence interval for each simulation. The proportion of simulations for which the confidence interval contains Pi is recorded. If the method for constructing confidence intervals is valid, then about 95% of the 95% confidence intervals should contain Pi.

A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps. A quote by American humorist and cartoonist James Thurber (1894 - 1961). The quote appeared in "Such a Phrase as Drifts Through Dreams," a short story in Thurber's last book, "Lanterns and Lances", Harper Publishing, 1961. The quote also appears in "Statistically Speaking: A dictionary of quotations" compiled by Carl Gaither and Alma Cavazos-Gaither.

This Web site is a course in statistics appreciation; i.e., acquiring a feeling for the statistical way of thinking. It is an introductory course in statistics that is designed to provide you with the basic concepts and methods of statistical analysis for decision making under uncertainties. Materials in this Web site are tailored to meet your needs in making good decisions by fostering statistical thinking.

The site provides an introduction to understand the basics of and working with Excel. Redoing the illustrated numerical examples in this site will help in improving your familiarity, and as a result, increase the effectiveness and efficiency of your process in statistics.