Practical Statistics for Information Professionals
ASIST Annual Meeting
Saturday, November 3, 2001, 9am-5pm
Are you puzzled by some of the statistics that you see in information science literature? Do you wish that you could learn statistics without facing mathematical equations or
formulae? Do you ever need to do some basic number crunching to make sense of data or to help make a point? If your answer to any of these questions is yes, then this course is for you. This practical, informative workshop is
designed to help information professionals improve their proficiency in understanding and interpreting statistics. In the same way that you can appreciate a Beethoven symphony without being a professional musician, you can learn to
understand statistical results without knowing all of the intricacies of statistical theory. This course will provide you with an understanding of a few essential statistical concepts that will carry you a long way toward making
sense of the numbers maze.
You Will Learn About
- What descriptive statistics, such as mean and standard deviation, tell you
- The meaning of "statistically significant"
- When you can be confident of a statistical result
- What to look for in statistical results generated by computer software and how to interpret them
- How to organize data into a computer file for analysis
- How to conduct a preliminary data analysis using statistical software
- How to generate graphs to make your points
- How to summarize data into basic measures such as mean and standard deviation
Dr. Liwen Vaughan, associate professor in the faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario Liwen has taught courses in statistics for over ten years with great success and
is particularly known for making statistics understandable to people with little math background. Her book Statistical Methods for the Information Professional: A Practical, Painless Approach to Understanding, Using, and
Interpreting Statistics has recently been published in the ASIST
monograph series. Registrants of this course will receive a complimentary copy of the book.