The past few lessons on statistics have been a good refresher for my past training in Mathematics. Learning some new terms in Lesson 11 and reviewing some old terms in Lesson 12 has been fun. In Lesson 13, however, the discussion about testing the null hypothesis was different than what I remember from my previous Statistics courses. Therefore, I will need to listen to this class again and/or check the textbook to make sure that I understand what Dr. Norman was saying. I still like Dr. his teaching approach, although I think he has painted a far worse picture of Statistics than what it really is.

I especially like his focus on simplicity. I recall from an earlier lecture that he urged the class to always look for the simplest theory, and in this lesson, he was urging us to keep our statistical analysis as simple as possible. As I listened to his discussion of the t-test and the Chi-square test, I was reminded of how long it has been since I have studied those tests. I am glad that I still have my old math books so that I can have more than one source of information for re-learning these methods. It is amazing to me how much we forget over time.

In this lesson, the term "ANOVA" was new to me. When Dr. Norman was talking about the sum of squares and degrees of freedom that are associated with this type of analysis, though, I was wondering if ANOVA is just a new term for what I would have once called Regression Analysis. If so, then I understand the application even if I am new to the term. This whole class is reminding me of how much I like Statistics, which, of course, is why I signed up for it in the first place.

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