Week 11,
Basic Statistics:
Scales, distributions, variance, the normal distribution
.
Lecture notes
Key topics: 
- Using numbers to represent “reality”:
- Key role in science
- Problems and potential political biases.
- Types of numbers:
- Scales: ratio, interval, ordinal, categorical
- Frequencies, frequency distributions
- Characterizing trends in data:
- measures of central tendency; mean (M), mode, median.
- measures of variance: range and standard deviation
- The Normal distribution & statistical decisions
- The critical ratio and hypothesis testing.
Understand all the italicized terms: they will be crucial to the entire statistics section.
The properties of the normal distribution in particular are central to this section.
The lecture notes are here.
Readings
Chapter 4 (or the basic statistics chapter) of your text.
Other readings: politics and statistics, political uses of science, fraud in education tracking.
Discussion Group
Basic frequency distributions.
