The Instructor

Gene V Glass
Email: glass@asu.edu

Meeting Times

The 2003-04 DELTA cohort will take COE 502 during the fall semester. There will be two face-to-face meetings between the cohort and me. The purpose of these face-to-face meetings will be for me to lecture, answer questions and help you with learning software and solving computer problems. The rest of the instruction will be self-paced and online. The work needs to be completed by the end of the Fall '03 semester. The dates for our meetings are Tuesday, September 2, and Tuesday, October 28. These two meetings will take place at 4:40 p.m. in a computer lab at the ASU Downtown Center. We should not run later than 8 p.m. More details later.

Materials

You need two things: a textbook and a computer program. The text is Glass & Hopkins (1996; 3rd Edition). Statistical Methods in Education & Psychology. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. (ISBN 0-205-14212-5).
The course will be oriented around teaching you how to perform and interpret basic statistical analyses by personal computer. We will work with a "spreadsheet" program to perform the analyses. There are a few full- function spreadsheets out there in the world, but I have a strong preference for Microsoft Excel. It comes in both Windows and Macintosh versions. Excel in its later versions (I am familiar with versions 4 and 5) is a very powerful program for statistical analysis. I have checked out the Claris spreadsheet for Macintosh and found it to be much too limited in statistics to serve your needs in this course. I am not familiar with the capabilities of QuatroPro. Lotus 1-2-3 is another powerful spreadsheet program that can handle all the statistics we will need in the course, but if you have the choice, I would much prefer that you work with Excel. So, you need to find a place to work that offers you a fairly recent version of MS Excel (or less desirably, Lotus 1-2-3) on a PC or Mac. I hope this isn't going to impose any hardship on anyone. If it does, I can help you find and install a freeware version of a spreadsheet program that can do much of what Excel does. (If you are pretty adept at computers and have some background in statistics already and are familiar with a different statistical analysis program like SPSS or Systat, you should be able to use those and handle anything we will do.)

The Course

The course (lectures, assignments, etc.) are contained on this website—http://glass.ed.asu.edu/stats/. We will cover parts of about nine chapters in the textbook; we will skip a good deal of what is in these chapters and all of many other chapters. The textbook is not a book that you are expected to "master." I hope you will learn many things from it, but far from evcerything that it contains. And in the future you may go back to the text as you broaden your knowledge of statistical methods.
The main topics we will study include

Graphing and tabulating data
Describing data sets: central tendency, variability and skew
Normal curve and standard scores
Correlation and regression
Proportions and Contingencies
Sampling and statistical inference

There will be 6 assignments to be completed and handed in.

Tests and Grades

There will be one exam at the end of the course. It must be completed independently and within a fixed time limit. You will receive instructions as the end of the course nears. All six assignments must be completed before the final is taken. The course grade is based on performance on the final exam.
There is one thing worth knowing about grades, viz., how have I graded in this course in the past? Ans.: pretty generously. Cs are infrequent; As and Bs split about 70%-30% or 80%-20%.

The Lessons

Links to Online Resources for Statistics

Here are some helpful auxilliary websites that will mean more and might come in handy down the road.