Great new SOFA teaching resource

Thanks to George Self there is a great new teaching resource available for SOFA users. See https://goo.gl/4lpIaO Here is George’s announcement repeated from the discussion group:

I teach an undergrad research methodology class and wrote a SOFA-based lab manual for that class that some of you may be interested in. You can find the manual and the data sets at https://goo.gl/4lpIaO.

The manual has ten chapters:

  1. Introduction (data types, normal distribution, kurtosis, skew, null hypothesis, downloading/installing SOFA, recoding data)
  2. Central Measures (mean, median, mode)
  3. Data Dispersion (range, quartiles, standard deviation)
  4. Visualizing Dispersion (box charts)
  5. Frequency Tables (frequency tables, crosstabs, complex crosstabs)
  6. Visualizing Frequency (histogram, bar chart, clustered bar chart, pie chart, line graph)
  7. Correlation (pearson’s r, spearman’s rho, significance, scatter plots)
  8. Regression
  9. Hypothesis Testing: Nonparametric Statistics (SOFA Statistics Wizard, Kruskal-Wallis H, Wilcoxon Signed Ranks, Mann-Whitney U)
  10. Hypothesis Testing: Parametric Statistics (ANOVA, t-test-Independent, t-test-Paired)

There are also two appendices, the first is a data dictionary for each of the data sets used and the second covers the various report generating features of SOFA.

The lab manual covers all of the functions and features of SOFA, but in the context of a lab where those functions are practiced rather than just described. The manual also includes a lot of information about how the various statistical measures are used (for example, the difference between correlation and causation). No math knowledge beyond simple high school algebra is assumed on the part of the student and each of the labs includes a “deliverable” activity so instructors can use this as part of a class.

I’ve printed this manual under Creative Commons-BY-ShareAlike so please feel free to use this in any way you want. Of course, I’m also happy to receive comments that could help me improve this manual in the future.

–George

Please give the resource a spin and provide George with any feedback that can improve/refine it. Once again, thanks George for making this available to the community 🙂

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