Statistics

Statistics as a Liberal Discipline

There are books on statistical theory, and there books on statistical methods. This is neither. Now available with Macmillan's online learning platform Achieve, Statistics: Concepts and Controversies (SCC) is a book on statistical ideas and statistical reasoning and on their relevance to public policy and to the human sciences from medicine to sociology. The text includes many elementary graphical and numerical techniques to give flesh to the ideas and muscle to the reasoning. Students learn to think about data by working with data. We have not, however, allowed technique to dominate concepts. The text's intention is to teach verbally rather than algebraically, to invite discussion and even argument rather than mere computation, though some computation remains essential. The coverage is considerably broader than one might traditionally cover in a one-term course, as the table of contents reveals. In the spirit of general education, the authors have preferred breadth to detail.Achieve for Statistics: Concepts and Controversies connects the problem-solving approach and real-world examples in the book to rich digital resources that foster further understanding and application of statistics. Assets in Achieve support learning before, during, and after class for students, while providing instructors with class performance analytics in an easy-to-use interface.