Week #3

This weeks lab has the following objectives.

  1. Discuss case study on experimental techniques and the treatment of data (from last week's readings).

  2. Discuss last week's readings related to developing a research question.

  3. Discuss how to analyze an information source.

  4. Discuss how to distinguish scholarly journals from other periodicals.

  5. Learn how to calculate or create the following in Excel:

    • descriptive statistics

    • ranks and percentiles

    • frequency distributions, and

    • histograms

  6. Form research project groups and discuss your research question.  Begin working on Research Assignment 1

  7. Introduce reading material for next week's lab session.

The following assignment(s) is(are) associated with this week's lab.  The assignment(s) is(are) due at the start of next week's lab.

  1. Statistics Assignment #1 for 1/26.

  2. Project Assignment #1 for 1/26.

Read and/or review the material found at each of the following links:

Critically Analyzing Information Sources

        http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/research/skill26.htm

Distinguishing Scholarly Journals from Other Periodicals

        http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/research/skill20.html

Descriptive Statistics (for your review or supplemental reading from the class text)

Good basic site - http://www.mste.uiuc.edu/hill/dstat/dstat.html

Descriptive Statistics in Excel

Very straightforward, easy to understand instructions for the Descriptive Statistics tool from www.statsteacher.com: http://www.statsclass.com/excel/analyses/summary.html

Another site with straightforward, easy to understand instructions for the Descriptive Statistics tool: http://cameron.econ.ucdavis.edu/excel/exdesc.html

A good sight, with other Excel help information: pay special attention to items A-J: http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/maybe/maybe3.htm

Histograms in Excel

Very straightforward, easy to understand instructions for the Histogram tool from www.statsteacher.com: http://www.statsclass.com/excel/graphs/histogram.html

Another set of easy to understand instructions for the Histogram tool: http://www.ncsu.edu/labwrite/res/gt/gt-bar-home.html#ith

Yet another set of easy to understand instructions for the Histogram tool: http://cameron.econ.ucdavis.edu/excel/exhist.html

If you did not install this last week, here is the link - Analysis ToolPak Installation

What is Science? (http://books.nap.edu/html/obas/)

Values in Science

Required - http://books.nap.edu/html/obas/contents/values.html