MATH 1342 - Austin Community College District
MATH 1342
Elementary Statistics
Mary Parker, co-chair; mparker@austincc.edu 223-4846
Gustavo Cepparo, co-chair, gcepparo@austincc.edu 223-4443
A full list of the committee can be found at
Notes for Instructors
2012-2013
Course instructor website:
Course website for students:
We have adopted the new edition of David Moore’s text, with various supplements. See the student handout for details.
For the sections of MATH 1342 which are a part of the Statway program, we have adopted a different textbook to supplement to the Statway materials. Find details about that on our instructor website above.
For the instructor:
New instructors:
Moore’s text focuses on statistical literacy. It has considerably more, and more sophisticated, material on descriptive statistics and data analysis than many texts. If you have not taught from one of his texts before, you will want to read the sections carefully because some of the material may be new to you, or at least not what you have come to expect in an elementary statistics text.
All instructors:
New in this edition:
1. Look at the answers in the back of the book. These are more extensive than before. The “list of suggested problems” is (will be) similar to that of previous years, but many of us will need to re-think our strategy for homework assignments and grading. It will be easier than ever for students to work on problems and check their work. But it will be tempting for them to just copy and mislead themselves about how much they actually know.
2. StatsPortal has expanded and improved in various ways. The Learning Curve is an exciting new feature which several of us used in a “beta version” last year and found very helpful. There are increasing numbers of videos, an improved version of Crunch-It, as well as a wealth of material that had already been available. You can make specific assignments in StatsPortal, but are not required to at this time. You are required to show your students enough of it that they see it is a resource for them to use in various ways.
3. Each chapter of the text has “Exploring the Web” exercises at the end of the exercise list. These provide a way of assigning some work that is more like a project than a typical homework exercise, but doesn’t require as much effort as an actual project. These are not included in the suggested exercises because we think that it is too much for the department to require one from each chapter. Please do include some of them, and lets have a conversation over the next year about which ones worked out well for you (and which didn’t!)
4. For the first time for this book, you will be using an Instructor’s Edition which is different from the Student Edition.
a. From pages 1 through 681, the books are almost identical, with identical numbering, so there is no need for you to have both books. A couple of pages for the instructor, unnumbered, are inserted at the beginning of each chapter.
b. Starting on page 682, the Student Edition has “Answers to Selected Exercises” which is just the same answers as the odd-numbered ones in the Instructor Edition. The page numbers are different. (I am not sure what the title of this section in the Instructor Edition is referring to as “Chapter Quizzes.” I guess just the “Check your skills” sections.)
c. At the beginning of the Instructor’s Edition is a 2-page Preface to it, which is not in the Student Edition. The rest of the beginning material in the book is exactly the same in both editions, but those extra two pages make the numbering different. So, in the Roman-numeral numbered front matter, the page numbers in the student edition are different, ending in xxiii rather than the xxv of the Instructor’s Edition.
5. Many of the previous exercises are still included, but with a lot of changing which are odd-numbered and even numbered, and quite a few new exercises.
6. New edition: What’s New: Please read the material on pages xi and xii about “What’s New” in this edition. In particular, notice that, in this edition, we have gone back to having confidence intervals and hypothesis tests introduced in separate chapters (14 and 15.)
7. We have instructed the bookstore not to stock the books separate from StatsPortal access. Students may, of course, get individual books elsewhere, but when the bookstore was stocking them separately, many students spent more than $75 on a rental book, e-book, or used book which did not give them the resources they needed, and then couldn’t afford to purchase StatsPortal with the resources they needed. Since StatsPortal alone has all the needed materials, and costs not much more than $75, the argument of helping the students save money does not impress us. The most important way to help the students save money is for them to have the resources they need to effectively learn the material and not have to repeat the course.
8. Each teacher does not have to set up his class’s StatsPortal account. We are setting them all up this time.
a. We think this will be easier for teachers to get started with and maybe even to continue with for quite awhile.
b. They will have consistent “titles” and it will be easier for students to find the correct one. (No more “ACC” and “Austin Community College” showing up as separate institutions.)
c. We are putting a bit more help on the Resources page for students to locate the resources they need.
d. We will put some “assignments” into StatsPortal, but with no due dates. (Learning Curve and Pretests and Posttests.) That’s so that the students can find these easily and keep track of how they have done in them. You can, of course, tell your students that some or all of those assignments won’t count in their course grade. Most of us will be doing that, or, if we count them in the grade at all, it will just be a few of them, and probably give full credit for attempting them. Since Fall 2012 is the first semester we are doing this, we’ll be discussing it and making changes. We hope that all of you will participate in the discussion.
e. Individual teachers can set up assignments in StatsPortal and use it differently than our standard course. You can take our standard course and add and delete assignments. If you intend to provide assignments, we can give you a version of our standard course without any assignments in it if you want to start in that way. Tell Mary Parker if you want your initial course set up differently than our standard course.
f. Do not keep all your grades for the course in StatsPortal. If you keep grades electronically, do it in Blackboard, which the college maintains as a secure system. If you make assignments in StatsPortal that count in their grade, it is OK to keep those grades there. Then you can compute an appropriate summary of them and enter that summary into Blackboard, or your paper records, etc.
Focus on concepts: Here are a few ideas.
1. Use the Learning Curve in StatsPortal as a way to help students review material efficiently. If you require this for some chapters early in the semester, we have found that most students will continue to use it on their own even if it is not required.
2. Students read in advance: We have found that, with help from the quite straightforward questions in the Pretests and Posttests in the StatsPortal (Personalized Study Plan at the beginning of each chapter) to guide them, the students can profitably read the material in advance of classroom lecture/discussion for many of the chapters.
3. Multiple-choice questions on concepts: Gustavo, Mary, and Colleen have found that the Statway materials have some excellent multiple-choice questions which test students’ understanding of the concepts and are easy to modify to use different examples. And we have found that, for today’s students, some good multiple choice questions like these are good for getting students to focus on sorting out correct ideas from the incorrect interpretations. We will be discussing those with you in our August course session and also by email.
4. Start the semester with Data Production (chs. 8, 9, and Data Ethics). Get a Discussion Board going and arrange your class to require some reading of the book outside of class. Colleen and Mary found that this enlivened their classes considerably and that excitement and energy persisted through the semester. Also, it was easier to deal with the needed software in Chs. 1 and 2 since it wasn’t absolutely at the beginning of the semester.
5. More about sampling distributions and concepts of inference. Mary Parker has experimented some, and will continue working on, incorporating some re-sampling ideas into the course very early to motivate the idea of sampling distributions and to get students thinking in terms of the inference concepts early. If you are interested in this, ask her to see some materials.
6. Dealing with the details of the conditions: (Chs 18 – 22 particularly) Mary Parker and Colleen Hosking have some materials they are using to make this clearer for students and have it take up less time and attention. Ask them if you are interested.
Evaluation of the Course
As we all move our courses into this new world of extensive solutions to half the problems in the book and extensive online resources, we have an increasing challenge of helping the students focus on what is useful to help them learn the concepts of statistics so that they can use it in their careers and their lives.
When we evaluate course packets for this course, in “How I Taught the Course”, we will expect you to address your homework/quiz strategy, that is, to discuss what you tried and how it worked. There are many options available to provide homework/quizzes for students – online and paper. You should provide a mix of problems for them to write out work themselves, for them to produce computer output and interpret it, and at least encouragement, even if not a requirement, for them to do enough online work that they engage with the online resources for this course.
We expect that your tests to have a substantial focus on concepts, as always. As we find new and better ways to do that in our homework and quizzes, we may all change our tests to some extent too, but we don’t want to move away from having them show us that they can produce well-written solutions to appropriate questions as a major part of our tests.
Our department is required to evaluate all of our Core Curriculum courses and to use the results of that evaluation to improve our instruction in the courses. Over the past several years we have found a need to make sure we focus on the four-step process, including checking conditions, and we have found that many of our students still need more help/encouragement to effectively use statistical software to do computations so that they can spend more of their attention on the concepts. Those ideas motivated our advice throughout this document.
Syllabus Overview
Chapters 1 – 11 and 14-24 are required. The author calls the starred material optional, but our committee has chosen to require some of it. See the next section called “Syllabus Details.” For your optional chapter, choose between 12, 13, 25, and 28. It is very important to start Chapter 14 just before or at the midpoint of the semester in order to be able to complete the syllabus.
Do not cover Chapters 12 and 13 until the end of the course, if at all. Some time is allowed at the end of the course for optional chapters and you may decide which ones to cover. As the author of the text identifies, Chapters 12 and 13 cover interesting material that is not needed for the rest of the course. And Chapters 23-29 cover additional topics in inference, where the school may pick and choose. Our syllabus requires that you cover chi-square tests and inference in regression (Chs. 23 and 24). After you have completed all of that, then you may choose what else to cover, including the possibility of spending some time having students present projects to the class, etc. Most teachers choose ANOVA, but some do other things Talk with members of the course committee if you have suggestions about what additional material we should require. You may wind up covering this last optional part very briefly, but do start the semester with a schedule that would allow you to include it.
Syllabus details:
The author identifies starred material as optional. Below is a discussion of all the starred material in the assigned chapters of the text as well as some discussion of the new material in this edition.
Chapters 1 and 2 software. Demonstrate using software in class as you do examples. Use Minitab, and also use Crunch-It some, since students have that to use at home in StatsPortal. If you show them how to use software several days in class before you insist that they use it, this will go more smoothly.
In using software in chapter 2, address how to handle two-group data where the data file has a “group” variable, such as the example on tropical flowers at the end of Chapter 2. This is addressed in Chapter 2 of the Minitab Manual. A major difficulty with Crunch-It is that you can’t “copy and paste” data from one location to another, so there you must use Data > Unstack if you want to separate it. Some of the graphs and summary dialog boxes allow you to tell it the data is in “factored” form so that you don’t have to unstack it first. We use these as a place to show students that Crunch-It is good to use at home for most things, but Minitab has some major advantages – one of which is the Minitab Manual.
Chapter 1. Graphical Displays. Emphasize reading graphs more than producing graphs by hand. Mostly have students produce graphs with software. While the text doesn’t cover dotplots, in fact, students understand them easily, and those may be the easiest way for students to do a quick graph by hand. Adjust your homework as needed so that they can see you use software several times before they have to submit work done using software.
Chapter 2. IQR and Outliers. Although this part of the chapter is called optional, we find it is useful to help students overcome their tendency to identify the max and min of a dataset as outliers.
Chapter 2. Organizing a statistical problem. Definitely discuss this.
Chapter 6. Two-way Tables. This entire section is required in our syllabus.
Chapters 8, 9, and Data Ethics. These are good chapters in which to emphasize students’ reading the chapters themselves (particularly if guided by the Pretests and Posttests in StatsPortal,) Discussion Boards, and other activity-based learning.
Chapter 9. Experimental Design. Sometimes students confuse random sampling with random assignment to experimental groups. To the extent you can keep these ideas distinct in the students’ minds, that’s good. This is particularly helpful when students will produce data themselves, for projects or in the future. It is often fairly easy to do random assignment to experimental groups, where it is usually more difficult than one would expect to do a simple random sample from a population. This means that students can more easily produce data appropriate for statistical analysis from designing experiments than from designing sampling schemes.
Commentary: Data Ethics. This is interesting. Definitely include this material in discussion in the course. It’s difficult to test over it.
Chapter 10. Probability. There is a short subsection on personal probability. It is optional but is easy to include. Use your own judgment about whether to include it.
Chapter 11. Sampling Distributions. This concept, as you know, is crucial. To support learning the concepts in the rest of the course, we have found it to be useful to talk here about “unusual values” for a sample mean (in the tails) and “usual values” for a sample mean (in the middle).
Chapters 12 & 13. Probability. Do not include these until the end of the semester, if at all.
Chapters 14 and 15. Confidence Intervals: The Basics and Tests of Significance: The Basics Notice that this material is now in two chapters instead of all in one as it was in the previous edition.
Chapter 16. Inference in Practice. The cautions and warnings here are very important, as is the discussion of the sample size needed for confidence intervals. The section on power is, of course, how one would find the sample size needed for a hypothesis test. You should tell the students that much, but it is probably not realistic to include power computations. We recommend that you include some short discussion of Type I and Type II error, just to help students understand that they are different and have different consequences. This is a very good answer to the question of “How should I choose a significance level?” But don’t get bogged down here – 20 minutes at most. Assign few, if any, problems in the homework and probably no problems on the test on Type I and Type II errors. The required material in the next four chapters is plenty challenging and students will need all the mental energy available to deal with those. Don’t let them bog down here.
Chapters 18-22. Inference.
It is important in these chapters to emphasize using software to do computations and focus more on the choice of technique and checking conditions. ( Crunch-It will use summarized data for proportions but not for means.) Students should do some computations by hand or with only a scientific calculator here, but not necessarily very many. You can give test questions that do that by having students set up the problem, then giving them the value of the test statistic, and asking them to finish the problem.
These chapters include using the t-distribution for inference on means and the normal distribution for inference on proportions. The problems in these chapters are more realistic than the problems in Chapters 14-17. That means that students are expected to learn about “robustness” - the conditions needed for each technique, taking into account the robustness of the technique, and how to assess whether those conditions are met in a particular problem. In particular, it is essential that you move the students past the “simple conditions” mentioned in Chapters 14-16. The condition that the population be normally distributed is needed to theoretically derive these techniques, but simulation studies show that the techniques are useful for many situations which do not meet the “simple conditions.” Developing sophistication about the meaning of these statements and how to use these ideas is a major part of this Elementary Statistics course. The homework problems include parts that address these ideas. Make sure that you give enough attention to the examples and homework problems that highlight this as you go through the material in class. Colleen Hosking and Mary Parker have been experimenting with various ways to make this work better. Ask them for their materials if you are interested.
For the last several years, as part of the assessment of the Core Curriculum, teachers were expected to ask their students at least over this material that used the “four-step process” and, for the purpose of evaluating this course, and reported the students’ performance on that question in terms of how well they addressed five different aspects of the solution . We continue to find that the students were not as good at dealing with the conditions as we’d like. Please continue to emphasize this. It is fine to give them a page with the conditions stated, so they only need to understand and be able to apply them, instead of memorizing them, or writing notes with them. Please emphasize using software to analyze data and check the conditions.
Chapter 19. Two-sample inference. Please do include the two starred subsections explaining why to avoid pooled t-procedures and inference about standard deviations. Notice that the material about use of the F test for comparing two standard deviations is no longer in the text, for the reasons described there. Do not include it here. If you will later do the ANOVA chapter, introduce the F distribution there.
Chapters 21 and 22: Proportions. The material on more accurate confidence intervals is rather interesting and do provide some increase in sophistication. Even if you choose not to ask questions requiring students to use these, do mention them and make sure that you are not encouraging students to use the large-sample methods on studies that do not meet the sample size requirements. You could do that by counting this answer correct on appropriate problems: “These data do not fit the conditions needed to give a large-sample confidence interval.”
Chapter 23: Chi-Square tests. The material on the chi-square test and the z-test should be included. It’s short and helps students make connections. The material on goodness-of-fit tests is optional. It’s fairly easy to include if you have about 30 minutes to spare. Use your own judgment about whether to include it.
Chapter 24: Linear Regression. There is enough material in this chapter that students will probably need two class days to deal with all of it even though it looks like you could address all of it on one day. We recommend that you do a problem in the early part of the chapter where you review most of the Chapter 5 material that students will not have thought about for a couple of months. In the section on prediction intervals and confidence intervals, be sure to point the students to some problems of each type. Generally there are more problems for the confidence interval for the mean when x=_ than there are for forming a prediction interval when x=_ so you’ll need to be careful in choosing problems to get some of each.
Prerequisite
Students who completed two years of high school algebra, even a number of years ago, rarely have trouble with the algebra in statistics. See the student handout for more information. Much more relevant is their skill in, and commitment to, reading carefully and doing problems that require several steps. It is particularly important that they be comfortable with calculator use, particularly with the order of operations and long calculations.
Because of an increase in the number of Early College Start students, we have had some high school students placed into 1342 who were exempt from TSI based on some high school test and haven’t yet taken Algebra II. Those students DO NOT meet the prerequisite and you should tell them not to stay in the course. Those students should finish their high school mathematics through Algebra II before attempting college-level mathematics courses. (The prerequisite statement in the student handout has been reworked to make this clearer.)
Homework
Encourage your students to use the various resources available. You should require students to do some homework to which they do not have the answers. It is a good idea to grade at least some problems every week.
The suggested guidelines and homework list is provided here just before the student handout. It is written to the student. Before you use these guidelines and list, edit them to fit your style of teaching. Make sure you have the students do problems using Minitab in about the same numbers as you see in this list and some problems for which they don’t have answers easily available.
It is important to encourage the students to do computer homework. (Some of our students use this course to meet a requirement in the UT Business School. They accept it contingent on our use of the software in the course.) However, it is also important to keep students from getting too frustrated. Some tips include: (1) encourage them to work together on computer homework; (2) give them enough flexibility about computer hw due dates that if they are stuck on something one night, they don’t have to spend 3 hours that night figuring it out; (3) encourage them to ask questions about it in class; (4) since printing sometimes doesn’t work smoothly, don’t make a big deal about having pretty printout; (5) remind them that not every piece of a computer hw problem has to be done on the computer; (6) encourage them to think of the computer as a tool to make analysis of large data sets easier or to do messy calculations; (7) in grading, emphasize their written analysis of what they learned from the computer output rather than grading the output itself.
Make it clear to the students that their first obligation in the course is to learn how to think about the data and concepts. Some students will distract themselves from the main points in the course by an overemphasis on the details of dealing with the software.
I (M. Parker) used to ask a test question or two about how to do something in MINITAB, but I have found that less satisfactory recently, since students use a mixture of commands and menus. So now I confine myself to questions that ask them about interpreting output on the tests and then I have them turn in problems done with MINITAB fairly often during the semester. I continue to assign regression problems as take-home quiz problems for several weeks after we finish that chapter. Ask for details.
Testing and Grading
It is important that your tests and other assessments reflect the objectives of the course. In particular, students should be required to communicate their understanding of the results of statistical analyses in writing in the course. While some multiple choice questions can be quite useful, a majority of the grade in the course should be based on tests with problems where students write out solutions and interpretations. Projects that require students to use the ideas on other data (possibly data that they collected themselves) are also useful experiences for the students.
The multiple choice questions at the ends of the chapters are mostly too straightforward to be good models for test questions. The questions in Learning Curve in StatsPortal and some of the multiple-choice concept questions in Statway are much better. Probably an individual multiple choice question should count about 3 points or less. When materials are provided to the instructors with examples of multiple choice questions, instructors should generally not hand those out to students. Our students do communicate with each other and we don’t want a “bank” of our best multiple choice questions to become available to students generally.
Since the material in the course is comprehensive, it probably is a good idea to emphasize that to the students and maybe put an important problem from the previous chapters on each test. Ideally, students should review a few key ideas from earlier chapters at each stage. Statistics is not intended to be a memorization course. Feel free to let them use some notes on tests. For most students, preparing those notes contributes strongly to their learning.
We have found that some statistics students assume the course will be easy, don't take the course seriously, and do poorly on the first test. Many of these will become good students if your grading system allows them to "make up" a grade. We encourage you to find a way to do that, by substituting the homework grade, or a later test grade, for a poor grade. Grading on a "curve", or simply adding extra points if many people do poorly on a test, doesn't send the correct message. Providing an extra incentive to do well on later assignments sends a better message. If a test score is below 60, some feel the student should be asked to completely correct that test to raise the score to 60 before the homework substitution could be made.
First Day Handout
A standard first day handout is provided for you to edit and use. Also, you must distribute a handout about using MINITAB and you must assign some homework. See the suggested guidelines and homework list included in this handout and the suggested handouts for MINITAB are on the course website. Use these or write similar material for your students. When you submit materials from this course for your evaluation, you are expected to include material to make clear that you assigned enough problems in the book and enough work with MINITAB, and how those were counted in the grade.
Technology
Students should be able to graph and compute summary statistics with Crunch-It while they are working on homework. Strongly tell students not to compute standard deviations and correlation coefficients by hand. If you want to do one of these on a small easy data set to illustrate the idea, that is fine. But caution students that it is a WASTE OF TIME to compute the standard deviation or correlation coefficient “by hand”. Some students have a tendency to focus on computations rather than thinking and can spend unreasonable amounts of time typing in long data sets and computing these if you don’t warn them not to do that. Some students may know how to do some of this on calculators, and they may use their calculators for homework. We strongly advise you not to take any class time to show them how to use calculators. We need for you to model using software (including finding the datasets when appropriate, or typing in only very short data sets) and encourage them to use software efficiently.
We do expect students to be able to compute the regression coefficients if they are given the correlation coefficient and can use their calculator to find the means and standard deviations. The formula for the slope coefficient is important because it emphasizes the connection between the correlation coefficient and the slope coefficient.
Be sure that your tests do not require students to do computations without the technology they have learned to use.
Software:
Crunch-It (in StatsPortal) is in a new edition, which is better than before, but not as good as Minitab. Still, it is very useful for students to have something to use at home.
We are fortunate that our current version of Minitab, Version 16, does not look different from Minitab 14 or 15, so we haven’t had to change much about our instructions to students in quite a while. We have a number of licenses for simultaneous use. Please be sure that, when you leave the classroom, no copies of MINITAB are left open, because that will tie up that license. Each of you should be able to have Minitab 16 on an office computer. Ask Sharon Smith, one of the Math Administrative Assistants (at SAC) to arrange this for you. It may take a week or so. As we have learned in the past, this is always a problem on adjunct faculty computers because unknown persons re-format or replace them frequently and Minitab has to be re-installed. So please ask early and be patient. We will not be purchasing any stand-alone copies of Minitab 16. Mary Parker has a limited number of copies of the student version of Minitab 14 to lend to teachers to use at home. Ask her if you need this at mparker@austincc.edu.
Before you suggest to the students that they try any extra problem on the computer please do it yourself first. Many of the problems require the students to learn more detailed commands than are really worth their time. We have tried hard to make sure that those on the Suggested Homework list are reasonable. If you disagree with any of these, please tell us. We need that information to prepare next year’s Math Manual.
If you have any problems with the Computer Centers or Learning Labs about MINITAB or any confusion about that, please contact Mary Parker, mparker@austincc.edu, as well as expressing your concern in the lab itself. As with any computer use, problems occur sometimes. But we can solve them.
Options are available for students to use MINITAB at home, but do not require them to buy the software. Crunch-It works similarly enough to Minitab that it is reasonably easy to go back and forth and they already have access to Crunch-It in StatsPortal.
Distance Learning students will use the same materials and also they must purchase MINITAB to use at home. The package in the bookstore for the Distance Learning sections does include everything, including the Student Version 14 of the MINITAB software. ISBN 9781464129544. Students can also purchase the classroom section package and rent Minitab separately. Acceptable versions of Minitab are 14, 15, and 16. All of these are essentially the same on the analyses used in Elementary Statistics.
Obviously there are many statistical software packages we could be using. We have adopted Minitab as our main software, with Crunch-It for students to use for the simple calculations when they need to do some work at home instead of coming into the lab. If you want us to consider changing that, please give your input to the course committee. But we believe it is very important that have a coordinated approach across all sections of the course, so you are not free to just use whatever you want.
Lab Classes
The lab class to accompany MATH 1342 is MATH 0159. This meets for two hours per week (students pay for and receive credit for one hour) and students receive group tutoring help. It usually requires at least 12 enrolled students to make and, unlike the regular math-sequence lab classes, is not combined with the lab class for any other course. We are now running two sections and would be happy to run more if we can see it is likely that they would attract enough students to make.
Suggested Calendars and Testing Schedules
Option 1 Calendar:
|16-week semester |11-week semester |6-week semester |
|Week 1: 8, 9, Data Ethics |Week 1: 8, 9, Data Ethics |Week 1: 8, 9, Data Ethics, 1, 2, 3 |
|Week 2: 1, 2 |Week 2: 1, 2, 3, |Week 2: 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10 |
|Week 3: 3, 4 |Week 3: 4, 5 |Week 3: 11, 14, 15, 16, 17 |
|Week 4: 4, 5 |Week 4: 6, 7, 10 |Week 4: 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 |
|Week 5: 5, 6 |Week 5: 11, 14, 15 |Week 5: 23, 24 |
|Week 6: 7, 10 |Week 6: 16, 17, 18 |1/2 week: optional chap., Exam |
|Week 7: 10, 11 |Week 7: 19, 20, 21 | |
|Week 8: 14, 15 |Week 8: 22, 23 | |
|Week 9: 16, 17 |Week 9: 24 | |
|Week 10: 18, 19 |Week 10: optional chapter | |
|Week 11: 19, 20 |Week 11: Final Exam | |
|Week 12: 21, 22 | | |
|Week 13: 23 | | |
|Week 14: 24 | | |
|Week 15: optional chapter | | |
|Week 16: Final Exam | | |
Suggested Testing Scheme
Test 1: 8, 9, 1, 2
Test 2: 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, as well as some review on 8, 9, 1, and 2
Test 3: through Chapter 17 (omitting Chs. 12 & 13)
Test 4: through Chapter 22
Test 5: through the end of the course
Option 2 Calendar:
|16-week semester |11-week semester |6-week semester |
|Week 1: 1, 2 |Week 1: 1, 2, 3 |Week 1: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 |
|Week 2: 3, 4 |Week 2: 3, 4, 5 |Week 2: 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, Data Ethics, 10 |
|Week 3: 4, 5 |Week 3: 5, 6, 7 |Week 3: 11, 14, 15, 16 |
|Week 4: 5, 6 |Week 4: 8, 9, Data Ethics, 10 |Week 4: 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 |
|Week 5: 7, 8 |Week 5: 11, 14 |Week 5: 22, 23 |
|Week 6: 9, Data Ethics, 10 |Week 6: 15, 16, 17 |1/2 week: optional chap., Exam |
|Week 7: 10, 11 |Week 7: 18, 19, 20 | |
|Week 8: 14, 15 |Week 8: 21, 22, 23 | |
|Week 9: 16, 17 |Week 9: 24 | |
|Week 10: 18, 19 |Week 10: optional chapter | |
|Week 11: 19, 20 |Week 11: Final Exam | |
|Week 12: 21, 22 | | |
|Week 13: 23 | | |
|Week 14: 24 | | |
|Week 15: optional chapter | | |
|Week 16: Final Exam | | |
Suggested Testing Scheme
Test 1: through Chapter 4
Test 2: through Chapter 9
Test 3: through Chapter 17 (omitting Chs. 12 & 13)
Test 4: through Chapter 22
Test 5: through the end of the course
Suggested Homework Guidelines and Exercises, MATH 1342, BPS 55h edition
These will be similar to those of previous years and available by August 10, 2012.
Find them from
First-Day Handout for Students
MATH 1342 Elementary Statistics
Session: Fall 2012 / Spring 2013 / Summer 2013
|Synonym and Section: |Time: |Campus and Room: |
|Instructor: | |
|Office Number: |Office Hours: |
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Course Description: A first course in statistics for students in business; nursing; allied health; or the social, physical, or behavioral sciences; or for any student requiring knowledge of the fundamental procedures for data organization and analysis. Topics include frequency distributions, graphing, measures of location and variation, the binomial and normal distributions, z-scores, t-test, chi-square test, F-test, hypothesis testing, analysis of variance, regression, and correlation. Skills: S Prerequisites: A satisfactory score on the ACC Mathematics Assessment Test. A second option is an appropriate secondary school course (Algebra II) and completion of any TSI-mandated mathematics remediation.
Note: Texas State University recently changed their Transfer Guide to show that MATH 1342 is no longer considered equivalent to their QMST 2333 (Quantitative Methods). ACC’s BUSG 2371 is the correct equivalent to that course, which is needed for most majors in business.
Statement of Prerequisite Requirements: Students who satisfied the TSI math requirement by passing the THEA, COMPASS, or ASSET, or by ACC courses have satisfied the math prerequisite requirement for this course. Students should also have college-level reading skills. A student who is exempt from TSI or satisfied the TSI requirement in another way must also pass one of those tests unless she has passed high school Algebra II to satisfy the prerequisite. The new MATD 0385 (offered first in Fall 2009) is specifically designed to prepare students for 1332, 1333, and 1342.
Students in MATH 1342 will be expected to:
1. understand material from the text after reading it.
2. do homework using fairly complicated formulas after seeing one example
3. do some, but not much, algebraic manipulation of formulas
Required Materials:
• Access to the textbook: The Basic Practice of Statistics, 6h ed., by David S. Moore
• Videos: of demos/mini-lectures (StatClips); of examples (StatClips); statistics in the real world (SnapShots)
• Statistical Applets, for students to explore the concepts.
• StatTutor. Video tutorials for each chapter, in segments of about 2 minutes to 7 minutes.
• Learning Curve. This is an adaptive study tool, by chapter, which helps to build your understanding of concepts through questioning. Wrong answers don’t deduct points from your score; they just lead to suggestions for study and an additional question or two on that idea as you work toward the target score. And when you reach the target score, you have a perfect grade on this activity!
• Student Study Guide, with expanded solutions (more than in the back of the book) for about one-quarter of the odd-numbered exercises.
• Minitab Manual, with instructions and screenshots solving examples like those in our text, matching it chapter by chapter.
• Pretests and Posttests for each chapter which you can use to guide your reading.
• Crunch-It 2.0 software, which is similar to Minitab. Use it to do some statistical analyses at home.
Options for purchasing the required materials:
1. StatsPortal alone includes all these materials. It includes access to an electronic version of the book, which you can use while you are online, and all the other required materials, which are in StatsPortal.
Purchase StatsPortal directly from for about $84 (Sept 2012) and there is a refund period. (Read from the link at the end of page.)
Purchase from the ACC bookstore ( ISBN 9781429280020) for about $91.45 (Sept. 2012). No refunds from bookstores on software.
2. Package including a folder with an access code for StatsPortal and a paper copy of the text, hole-punched, so that you can put it in a binder. The cost for this package (Sept 2012) is $116.65 from the ACC bookstore and $109.39 from Amazon (July 2012). ISBN 9781464111259. No refunds from the bookstores on opened packages.
3. Separately purchase a book and StatsPortal. Minimum cost: about $170 if you find a used book.
4. Separately purchase an electronic book and StatsPortal. Minimum cost: about $150.
5. Rent a book and purchase StatsPortal. Minimum cost: about $150.
Required Technology: (More information – )
1. Scientific calculator
2. Access to MINITAB computer software. You are not required to buy/rent this. Use it in the math labs, ICT labs, and the Learning Labs.
3. Internet access to use the material in StatsPortal. Internet access is provided in several computer labs at ACC.
Instructional Methodology: This course is taught in the classroom as a lecture/discussion course.
Course Rationale: Students will learn to
1. Determine the aspects of a question, if any, for which statistics can provide relevant information.
2. Analyze statistical studies, particularly regarding appropriate sampling and experimental design.
3. Select and use appropriate statistical analyses to get useful information from data.
4. Communicate knowledge using standard statistical language and also interpret it in non-technical language.
This course meets the Core Curriculum requirement in mathematics. It meets the requirement for an introductory statistics course for students in many majors such as business, health sciences, and social sciences.
Course Objectives/Learning Outcomes:
Instructors must include all of these for this course, not just a link to them, in the First Day Handout for students. They are posted at
Calendar and Testing Schedule: Include your calendar and Testing Schedule
Grading policy: The instructor’s grading criteria will be clearly explained in the first-day handout. The criteria will specify the number of exams and other graded material (homework, assignments, projects, etc.). Guidelines for other graded materials, such as homework or projects, should also be included in the syllabus. This must include an appropriate amount of work using MINITAB. These guidelines must also specifically include:
• Missed exam policy
• Policy about late work
• Class participation expectations
• Reinstatement policy (if applicable)
Suggested statements: Read below and include the appropriate ones in your handout.
• Course-specific support services:
o ACC main campuses have Learning Labs which offer free first-come first-serve tutoring in mathematics courses. Not all mathematics tutors can tutor statistics. Check the lab schedule to see when statistics tutors are available. Students should bring their course handouts and notes when they come to the Learning Lab. The locations, contact information, and hours of availability of the Learning Labs are available from
o MATH 1342 Lab class: If your campus is offering a section of MATH 0159, Elementary Statistics Lab, give specific information about that.
• Reinstatement Policy: If the instructor chooses to allow reinstatements, he must include a statement about the circumstances under which is it allowed. One possible statement is: “In order to be reinstated, the student must demonstrate that he is caught up with the required work as of the date on which he wishes to be reinstated. This must be done before the official last date to withdraw for the semester.”
ACC Policies: ACC has a series of policies that the syllabus must contain. These policies include statements on
• Attendance, * Withdrawal, * Incomplete Grades, * Scholastic Dishonesty,
• Students Rights and Responsibilities, * Safety, * Use of ACC Email,
• Academic Freedom, * Testing Center, * Student Services, * Students with Disabilities
Your First Day Handout must have a statement for each of these headings.
Insert the full text of those statements, not just a link, in your First Day Handout.
To find the policies go to austincc.edu/mthdept5/mman12/statements.html
These are the ACC recommended statements, except for the Incomplete Grade statement. The included Incomplete Grade statement is a combination of the ACC recommended statement and the Math Dept recommended statement which we have used for many years.
Additional Details on Course Policies:
It is important that your syllabus / first-day handout provides clear statements to your students about the policies you will enforce. You are encouraged to provide an additional section of more detailed policies on the topics in the general ACC policies, consistent with the language that the math department and this course committee has used in the past. For most courses, that will include the number of absences that is unacceptable under attendance, the session's actual last date to withdraw, and possibly a statement on Student Discipline such as the one available from This section of your handout might be titled "Additional Details on Course Policies."
Following is suggested language
Attendance and withdrawals: Attendance is required in this course. Students who miss more than 10% of the classes may be withdrawn. The Final Withdrawal date for this session is _______________________________
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