POL PSTA - Statistics

Faculty
tba

Course Coordinator
Dorte Kronborg

Course content, structure and teaching

The course stress conceptual understanding rather than mere knowledge of statistically procedures. The emphasize is on interpretation and understanding of simple statistical methods as applied in social science, business economy as well as political economy. The major parts of the curriculum are: descriptive statistics, both numerical and graphical; the basic laws of probability, and the most important probability distributions; statistical inference; confidence intervals and significance tests about hypotheses; analysis of categorical variables using contingency tables; regression analysis; simple, multiple and logistic; one-way and two-way analysis of variance, and; non-parametric statistics.

Learning Objectives

The major goal of the statistics course is to produce statistically educated students which mean that students should develop statistical literacy and the ability to think and reason statistically. The student should be able to:

Analyze a problem to identify the given information and produce data that can provide answers to properly posed questions.
Use graphical and numerical methods for exploring and summarizing data on a single categorical or quantitative variable.
Describe basic probability and how probability helps us understand randomness in our lives, as well as grasp the crucial concept of a sampling distribution and how it relates to inference methods.
Choose and justify appropriate descriptive and inferential methods for examining and analyzing data and drawing conclusions.
Analyse the association between variables, categorical, continuous and both, using contingency tables, correlation, regressions, and analysis of variance.
Communicate clearly and effectively the conclusions of statistical analysis, i.e identify connections between basic statistics and the real world.

Type of examination, exam aids and assessment

Written group synopsis (10-15 pages) followed by individual oral exam (20 minutes per student), graded by teacher and internal censor on the 7-point scale. The group consists of 3-5 students. The grade is based entirely on the oral exam

Course literature

tba

Last updated by CBS International 03/05/2010