Making Sense of Data: Hands-On Hypothesis Testing with Statistics

Data are used to answer some of the questions we care about most, driving national policy in health, economics, education, and law. But, in practical terms, how do we use data to answer those questions, objectively and rigorously? In this semilab we will apply statistical analyses to real data to learn how to mine their meaning, separating out the "signal" from the "noise." We will also learn how to avoid some of the most pernicious traps that bias interpretation of statistics.