Statistics in Education for Mere Mortals (Canvas.net)

Statistics in Education for Mere Mortals (Canvas.net)
Free Course
Categories
Effort
Certification
Languages
Microsoft Excel, basic math skills
Misc
Statistics in Education for Mere Mortals (Canvas.net)
This short course will provide an introductory, hands-on introduction to statistics used in educational research and evaluation. Participants will learn statistical concepts, principles, and procedures by building Excel spreadsheets from scratch in a guided learning approach using very short video-based tutorials.

Examples of specific skills to be learned include scales or measurement, measures of central tendency, measures of variability, and the computation of the following: mean, mode, and median, standard deviation, z (standard) scores, Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient (r), dependent t test, and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA).

The course is designed primarily for two audiences: 1) educational professionals who would like to be more informed about how to compute basic statistics and how to use them intelligently in their work; and 2) first-year doctoral students who want a short and friendly introduction (or brush up) to basic statistics before taking full graduate-level statistics courses. However, this course would be useful to anyone who wants a good short, hands-on, friendly, introduction to the most fundamental statistical ideas.

By the end of the course, you will know or be able to do the following:

Introduction to Statistics:

Scales of measurement

Measures of Central Tendency: Mean, Median, & Mode

The Normal Distribution

How to compute a mean using Excel

Descriptive Statistics:

Measures of variability: Standard deviation

Standard (z) scores

How to compute the standard deviation using Excel

How to compute a z score using Excel

Correlational Statistics:

The difference between univariate and bivariate distributions

The concept of correlation and the difference between positive and negative correlations

How to compute a Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient (r) using Excel

Inferential Statistics:

Hypothesis testing and the null hypothesis

Statistical significance

Independent and dependent variables

How to compute a t-test value for an independent-samples design using Excel

How to compute a t-test value for a correlated-samples design (i.e. dependent t test) using Excel

Testing for differences between more than two means: The F distribution

How to compute an analysis of variance (ANOVA) using Excel