Contact Information
General Course Information
Topic calendar
Required Textbooks

Where and When?

Schroeder Hall, room 116 MWF @ 10-10:50

Course Description & Objective.

Logic of statistical inference: interval estimation, complex hypothesis testing, and non-parametric techniques. Applications in behavioral sciences. My goal in this course is to provide an introduction to the basic statistical methods used in the behavioral sciences. This includes some experimental design, probability theory, descriptive statistics (e.g., means, standard deviations), and inferential statistics (t-tests, correlation, regression, ANOVA). Students will also learn the basics of the statistical package SPSS.

Course Requirements.

Each student will be evaluated based on their performance on two mid semester exams, 1 final exam (cumulative, but with an emphasis on the final third of the course), and homework (and possibly some quizzes, to be discussed on the first day of classes). The breakdown is presented below.

1 final exam 30%
2 mid-semester exams 20% each
about 13 homeworks 30%


Homework will typically be due on the first lecture after we have completed discussing a chapter (exceptions will probably occur as we near an exam, to allow for enough time to grade and return the homeworks before the exam). To turn it in early, please bring it to the main office (DeGarmo 435) and ask that it be placed in the instructor's mail box. One final point about homework, it must be neat. If the homework cannot be read, then it cannot be graded, and no credit will be given. So make sure that your work is neat and legible.

Class Policies

• If you are going to miss a quiz or an exam it is critically important that you notify me AS SOON AS YOU KNOW that you'll be absent and WHY. Call, e-mail, or talk to me in person. Make-ups are very rarely given without prior notification of an absences. Opportunity to make-up the missed work requires prior notification of the absence and an excused absence (that is one that you instructor accepts as reasonable and legitimate). How and when the work will be made up will be determined by the instructor.
  
• You are expected to do your own work. Plagiarism and cheating of any sort will not be tolerated. Either behavior will result in a grade of 'F'. Note that cheating includes copying another student's homework. Making up false excuses for absences will also be considered cheating and may result in a grade of 'F' for missed work.
  
• And finally, if you have any questions regarding anything in the syllabus and or the course in general, please feel free to ask. Talk to me in class, via phone, or e-mail. Don't just assume that you know (or should know) the answer, I may not have been clear enough or may have forgotten to mention something.

Moore, D. S., & McCabe, G. P. (1998). Introduction to the practice of statistics, 3rd edition.W. H. Freeman and Company: NY. Your textbook's web page.

Some Statistical Resources

• Statistics review from Statistics I, psych 240
• SPSS Home Page
• Statistics on the Web