Preface

Before we describe the changes and new features in this version, we want to highlight what has not changed: Workshop Statistics aims to provide students and instructors with a self-contained, learner-centered resource of activities through which students can discover statistical concepts, explore statistical properties, and apply statistical techniques. The features that distinguished the original edition, detailed in the original preface reprinted below, have been retained: emphases on active learning, conceptual understanding, genuine data, and use of technology.

WHAT'S NEW

New Topics
New topics have been added on sampling distributions and the Central Limit Theorem for sample means, chi-square tests for two-way tables, and inference for correlation and regression. Many other topics are given a much fuller treatment, such as probability and experimental design. Concepts and techniques that have been added within topics include mean absolute deviation, relative risk, stratification, and blocking.

New and Revised Activities
Many of the in-class activities have been re-written and new ones developed to better focus students' attention on the statistical principles being introduced. Many of the new activities address conceptual understanding in particular. Numerous homework activities have been added to allow instructors more choices in activities to assign.

New and Updated Data
Many of the time dependent data sets in the original edition, most recorded in the early 1990s, have been updated to more current values. These include Senators' and Justices' years of service, Hollywood and Broadway box office revenues, golfers winnings, Presidential election results, governors salaries, and baseball results, to name just a few. The use of hypothetical datasets has been decreased.

New Organization
The book continues to be arranged around six units, each comprised of multiple topics. Some of these units and topics have been re-organized. Unit II addresses comparisons as well as relationships, with relationships between categorical variables moved earlier and considered as comparisons. The issue of data collection now comprises the third unit. The unit on principles of inference now encompasses inference for population means as well as proportions, eliminating the need for a unit on inference for measurements. The final unit presents inference for both comparisons and relationships.

New Formatting
As in the first edition, expository paragraphs are interspersed among the activities to reinforce the ideas that students are to garner from the activities. The more important of these expository passages have been highlighted within boxes to ensure that students do not miss the most important ideas. The header now helps students and instructors to find activities by number more easily, and page references are now given for the numerous activities that refer to previous ones.

TECHNOLOGY AND DATA

Students are intended to use technology with this book, both as a tool for analyzing data and as a vehicle through which to explore statistical concepts. Roughly half of the activities require the use of a software package or graphing calculator. This version of the book assumes that students will use Fathom Dynamic Statistics Software, a package developed specifically for demonstrating and investigating statistical concepts in an educational setting. Fathom allows students to easily generate statistical graphs and analyses and then interact with the rsults dynamically by dragging points, moving sliders, manipulating parameters, and collecting repeated simulations.

Instructions for using Fathom have been integrated into the activities, and an appendix providing an overview of Fathom has been included. The Fathom insructions presented in the text are designed to work with version 1.1 of the Fathom software for either Windows or Macintosh platforms. While we do not intend this book to be a user's manual for all that Fathom can do, the focus is on helping students to use Fathom as an aid in discovering statistical concepts and exploring statistical principles.

We intend for this text to be flexible enough to support a variety of implementations for instructors and students with varying degrees of access to computing facilities. With few exceptions we recommend that students investigate a concept through hand-drawn displays and calculator-assisted calculations before proceeding to use Fathom to check their work and to explore larger data sets. On most homework activities, whether or not a student should use Fathom is left to the instructor's discretion. Our goal has been to provide detailed enough instructions that students can complete Fathom activities, with a minimum of instructor support, outside of class time if necessary.

All of the datasets in the book are available for downloading from the Web in a variety of formats (including as Fathom documents), so there is no need to type in data by hand. See the publisher's web site at www.keycollege.com or the authors' web sites at www.rossmanchance.com/wsf/ for links to these datasets.

ACCOMPANYING RESOURCES

Instructors and students who use this book should be aware of a variety of supporting materials that are available. A complete Guide for Instructors is also available, as well as solutions to selected activities, sample syllabi, and sample exams. As mentioned above, downloadable datasets are also available, as are some Java applets to accompany selected activities. Please check the publishers' web site at www.keycollege.com or the authors' web sites at www.rossmanchance.com/wsf/ for links to these materials.

OTHER VERSIONS

This second edition of Workshop Statistics is available in four versions. For the most part, the topics and activities in the various versions are identical. The differences are the technology-specific instructions that accompany the activities in the Minitab, Graphing Calculator, and Fathom versions, providing detailed instructions appropriate to the specific software package or calculator.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We gratefully acknowledge the very helpful feedback that we have received on the first edition of Workshop Statistics from the following instructors:

We also thank Sue Peters for providing helpful feedback while class testing this version of the book and David Kramer for copyediting.  We acknowledge the special assistance of our students in this project, including Jason Herr and Mary Joan LaFrance at Dickinson College for helping with compiling data, Lisa Mannerelli at Cal Poly for helping to develop solutions to homework activities, Matthew Weber at Dickinson for designing and setting up the website of teacher resources, and Sarah Auer at St. Lawrence University for working on adapting Fathom activities. We especially thank Bill Finzer and the rest of the Fathom development team for creating the software on which this book is based and being so responsive to our queries and requests for enchancements in version 1.1 of Fathom.

Allan J. Rossman
Beth L. Chance
Robin H. Lock
February 2001