Resource Library

This article addresses the reporting of meta-analyses of observational studies in order to aid authors, reviewers, editors and readers when reading or writing such reports.

This JAVA applet is designed to give students practice in calculating basic probabilities using the binomial distribution. The applet gives students short problem descriptions that require a binomial probability to solve. The user is then prompted to follow a step by step process to find the probability. Users must answer a step correctly before the applet will allow them to move on to the next step. The page also gives further exercises that allow the user to think about binomial distributions more deeply and gives a link to a more detailed information about the binomial distribution.

This article gives a description of typical sources of error in public opinion polls. It gives a short but insightful explanation of what the margin of error indicates as well as other common errors in opinion polls.

This applet allows you to manipulate the starting population, age-class survival rates, and age-class fecundity rates over 10 generations for up to 6 age classes. The default gives you the same population size for each age class as well as the same fecundity rate and survival rates. Move the sliders for each age class to manipulate each of these factors. You will see the relative proportions of each age class will change over time, but will eventually reach a stable age distribution.

This source defines and explains variance and standard deviation.

This section on Common Statistical Tests uses an example on faculty publications to show users how to perform a one-sample t test. The discussion includes one-tailed and two-tailed tests.

This site focuses on using the LRT to compare two competing models.

This site offers an involved definition of the likelihood ratio test with examples and formulas.

Explains how to set up the Kruskal-Wallis test and gives the formula for the test statistic.

This applet allows the user to adjust a (1st shape) and b (2nd shape) parmaters of the Beta distribution with a slider or manual input. The applet allows the user to fix the x and or y axes. The user immediately sees how this affects the the shape of the graph as well as the variance and the expected value. This page was formerly located at http://www.stat.vt.edu/~sundar/java/applets/BetaDensityApplet.html