A Guide to Using Statistics in BCS Lab Courses

This Stats Wiki is a guide to the use of statistical tests and software tools in BCS lab courses. If you are an undergraduate student who has been enrolled in a lab course, you are encouraged to skim through the example problems in this wiki before class begins. In the process of designing experiments and conducting statistical tests, this wiki can also help you by providing toy problems and their solutions, from which you can work by analogy.

If you are a graduate TA, please feel free to edit this wiki to make it more useful to students. To request editing permissions to this wiki (an existing wiki account is required), please contact Ting at tqian@bcs.rochester.edu .

Table of Contents

• General Guidance:

  • Understand your experiments
  • Choose the right statistical tests
  • Interpret a significant result

• Common Scenarios:

  • If you only need to estimate the value of one variable:

    • One group of data
    • Two groups of data
    • More than two groups data

  • If you need to know how well one variable predicts the other:

    • Correlation tests
    • Simple linear regression

  • If you need to know how well a set of variables predict some variable of interest:

    • Multiple regression
• Statistical Software Programs:
  • R
  • SPSS

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