Statistics
Statistics Online High School Course
COURSE LENGTH:
Full Year (30 Sessions)
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
In this year-long course students will be introduced to the major concepts and tools for collecting, analyzing, and drawing conclusions from data. The course covers four broad conceptual themes: Exploring and Describing Data, Planning a Statistical Study, Using Probability to Anticipate Patterns in Data, and Statistical Inference.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
Specific topics to be covered include descriptive statistics, data collection, experimental design, linear regression and hypothesis testing, as well as confidence intervals, and tests of significance.
Enduring understandings:
There are many important and intriguing questions facing society today. Do vaccines cause autism? Are global temperatures permanently rising? Is having a college degree likely to increase your annual salary? Is Tom Brady really the greatest quarterback of all time? A thorough knowledge of the terminology, techniques, uses, and limitations of statistical analysis is essential for anyone wishing to grapple with these questions.
More than anything else, this course is designed to introduce students to how to gather and analyze data, and to use statistical language to attempt to describe situations, answer questions, and make persuasive arguments. Students will also learn how to formulate open-ended questions and answer them systematically and quantitatively. Students will frequently explore and analyze “real world” data while learning to express complex statistical ideas using both the vocabulary of statistics as well as common, everyday language. They will be able to explain clearly (both orally and in writing) the results of their statistical analyses to both statisticians and non-statisticians.