About this Course
Welcome to the course notes for STAT 100: Statistical Concepts and Reasoning. These notes are designed and developed by Penn State's Department of Statistics and offered as open educational resources. These notes are free to use under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC 4.0.
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Course Overview
Statistics is the art and science of using sample data to understand something about the world (or a population) in the context of uncertainty. It is the science of learning from data.
Our hope is that after this course you will have developed a solid foundation in basic statistical ideas, learned how to relate those ideas to everyday life, and appreciate the importance of such an understanding.
Course Goals
- How to design a study or experiment;
- How the type of conclusions we draw from data are related to how they were collected;
- How to create and interpret summaries and graphs that show the salient features of data;
- Basic concepts of probability - the language of uncertainty
- How to spot statistical issues in the news and their effect on the veracity of claims made; and
- How to interpret statistical inferences made by Confidence Intervals and Significance Tests.