In order to learn the topics later in the statistics course, we must learn and remember the ideas and techniques in the early part of the course. It is sometimes hard to stay focused on that for the first half of the course, because the new topics don't seem to always relate to each other.
Follow each link to a chart which illustrates some of this dependence. Each has arrows from one of the earlier topics to the later topics using it.
Overview: The topics listed correspond to the chapters in our text. Chapters 1-13 are on the left, and Chapters 14-28 on the right.
Chapters 1 and 2. These topics will come up in many later sections.
Chapter 3, first part on distributions in general. It is important to notice that there are other distributions besides normal distributions.
Chapter 3. Normal distributions. These are used extensively in the latter half of the course. When you first need to use this material again in Chapters 9 and 10, it would be a good idea to come back and rework some of these problems, just for review.
Chapters 4 and 5. Correlation and regression. Although this material isn't used extensively again until Chapter 21, it is important to not forget it. You'll have occasional quizzes and test questions on it, particularly on using the computer to do the analysis and on interpretations. The light colored arrow to the material about matched-pairs comparisons indicates that sometimes people might use regression to analyze the relationship between the "before" and "after" values for a matched pairs experiment.
Chapter 6. Categorical variables. Relationships between non-quantitative variables are just as important and interesting as those between quantitative variables.
Chapters 8 and 9 . Producing data. This material on simple random sampling and experimental design is used throughout the rest of the course.
Chapters 10, 11, 12, 13 . All of inferential statistics is based on probability models, which are described in these chapters.
Chapter 11. We use summary statistics, like the sample mean or the sample proportion, to make inferences. So we must learn about the variability of these statistics over all the different possible samples. That's called analyzing sampling distributions. All the material in the later chapters is based on an analysis of the distribution of sampling distribution of some statistic. In this section, we look at the sampling distribution of the sample mean in some detail, and one of the problems mentions the sampling distribution of the sample proportion. These particular statistics are used in several of the later chapters, and then others are developed.
Chapters 14-16. These chapters explains the basic ideas of estimation and hypothesis testing. Those will be used in all the later chapters.
Last updated July 24, 2006 . Mary Parker
