Introduction

Welcome to the Educational Leadership Basic Statistics Web Site. You may have come here reluctantly or even fearfully. Yes, they do call statistics "sadistics." But forget all that. You’re going to be glad you learned basic statistics because:
  1. What you learn here is going to be very helpful—I would even say necessary—for your work in the Educational Leadership Program, particularly for you to understand many of the assignments you will be given in the research and evaluation courses and for you to carry out your practicum project.

  2. A basic knowledge of statistics will be essential in the higher-level positions you will be assuming after you get your doctorate and take on greater responsibilities. When researchers and statisticians present statistical analyses of population trends and educational programs, your eyes won’t glaze over, and you won’t have to excuse yourself from the meeting. You’ll have an understanding of the statistical techniques used, and you’ll be able to participate intelligently in the discussion—even raise questions and make criticisms.

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  3. An understanding of basic statistics will be of value to you personally because it will expand your intellectual horizon and enable you to critically analyze the statistics that are becoming commonplace in newspapers and periodicals—in health and medicine, sports, finance, and other areas. A knowledge of basic statistics is now an essential part of being a well-educated person.

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  4. Learning it is going to be fun.

What This Course Will and Won’t Cover

As the title says, this is a course in basic statistics. We’re going to cover what statisticians call measures of central tendency and dispersion, measures of association or relationship, methods for determining whether a difference between, say, two averages is a real difference and whether it’s educationally meaningful, and some other related concepts and techniques. We’re not, in this course, going to cover advanced statistical methods you may have heard of, such as analysis of variance and regression. Once you've finished this basic course, you'll be ready to tackle those more advanced techniques.

Don’t let these terms frighten you. You’ll have them all under your belt when you finish.

How Should You Use This Web Site, and How Long Will the Course Take?

The whole course will take several hours, so you’ll probably want to go through one or two lessons and come back later to continue.

The frame at the left contains the table of contents for the course, and each item there is linked to the section of the course that deals with it. That means you can easily move around in the sections of the course by clicking on the different headings in the table of contents. Also, after you’ve been through the course, if you want to refresh your understanding of how to carry out one of the procedures—say calculate a standard deviation—you can return to this site and simply click on that item in the table of contents.

Also, you can print out the entire course, or sections of it, and work on it at your desk (or even on an airplane!).

Exercises and Calculations

In each of the sections of this course, we will be going through examples, and you will be doing exercises. For this, you’ll need a pad of paper and a simple hand calculator. When you actually use the statistical techniques you’ve learned in this course in your practicum project or in research on your job, you almost certainly won’t do the calculations by hand. There are several software applications that will do them for you after you input your data (GB-STAT, SSPS, SAS, Excel, StatView, and others.) We won’t be covering those software programs in this course. In the exercises we will be doing, it’s important to do them manually so you get an understanding of how they work.

OK, let’s get started. Just click here to go to Lesson 1 on Measures of Central Tendency.