Statistics 101

Welcome to the Statistics 101 course, taught by Murtaza Haider, Assistant Professor at Ryerson University. Statistics is one of the most challenging topics to learn, but Murtaza brings a gentle introduction to statistics in practice. Learn about descriptive statistics, variance, probability, correlation, and data visualization. This course ends with a fully-guided statistics exercise exploring the “hot” topic of: do good looking professors get better teaching evaluations? A free trial of SPSS Statistics is included in this course.

Split into five modules, this is a beginner’s course covering the fundamentals of statistics. Start with mean, mode, and median. Then learn about standard deviation using examples from basketball. Learn about probability with dice. Learn what it means to group data by categorical variables, and how you can transform your data into appropriate graphs and charts.

In the final module, using an open dataset, learn whether good looking professors indeed get better teaching evalutions.

This course is taught using SPSS Statistics. No prior experience necesssary. A free trial is available through this course, available here: SPSS Statistics (Free Trial).

COURSE SYLLABUS

Module 1 – Welcome to Statistics!
Welcome to Statistics
Data visualization
All about data
SPSS Statistics
SPSS Statistics in 5 minutes
Lab exercises

Module 2 – Basic Statistics
Types of data
Measures of dispersion
Mean, median, mode
Statistics by data type
Probability
Lab exercises

Module 3 – Summarizing data
Statistics by groups
Visualization of group statistics
Pivoting
Cross-tabulations
Correlation
Lab exercises

Module 4- Data Visualization
Visualization fundamentals
Descriptive and statistical charts
Scatterplots
Statistical charts
Time series charts
Lab exercises

Module 5 – Does Beauty Pay?
Does Beauty Pay?
Weighted means, standard deviations
Data wrangling
Descriptive Statistics
Reproducibility with syntax in SPSS Statistics
Lab exercises