Hi- Before you adopt a textbook, you should think about what it looks like when a student becomes a "statistical thinker". It may be that the way you answer this will completely change your approach and will alter the suitability of existing textbooks.
As you consider what it looks like when a student becomes a statistical thinker, you might check out what people are doing along these lines. For example, check out Tintle et al. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00031305.2015.1081619 At CU, we developed a course called introduction to quantitative thinking which focuses more on developing statistical thinking than on learning how to do particular tests. So, for example, instead of launching into tests of differences in means, we have students simulate the expectations of the null by bootstrapping (or randomization) by shuffling cards with different values and then repeat the process using R. We do this before we introduce any statistical test. A Andrew Martin Professor University of Colorado A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions. ________________________________ From: Ecological Society of America: grants, jobs, news <[email protected]> on behalf of Howard S. Neufeld <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, September 18, 2017 8:14:00 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [ECOLOG-L] Basic Statistics Textbooks All - I'd like to endorse Mark's comments about texts. I switched from several different texts (Zar, Whitlock and Schluter, Hampton and Havel, Gotelli and Ellison), before settling on Glover and Mitchell, 3rd ed. This text is well written, geared for an upper level undergraduate or, as I use it, an Intro graduate level biostatistics course. It has dozens of problems in each chapter for the students and many well-worked out examples scattered throughout the text. It covers a wide range of subjects that are useful to students just starting out in statistics, from descriptive stats, hypothesis testing, parametric and non-parametric techniques, experimental design, basic probability, regression, and categorical analyses. This text is also printed as paperback and is only $45. I thought the Whitlock and Schluter book was well done, but it didn't cover topics I needed for a graduate level course, and it was very expensive. I have never liked Quinn and Keough - too difficult for beginning students. Gotelli and Ellison's book has very nice discussions of statistical methods for use by ecologists, including Bayesian statistics, but last time I looked (which was the first edition) it was deficient on practical exercises for students. I'm not sure if this has been remedied in later editions. As I emphasize to my students, statistics is like a riding a bike - you can learn as much theory as you want, but until you get on the bike (i.e., do the problems!) you won't really master the subject. So I tend to favor books with lots of practical exercises for the students. Howie Neufeld -- Dr. Howard S. Neufeld, Professor Mailing Address: Department of Biology 572 Rivers St. Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 Tel: 828-262-2683; Fax 828-262-2127 Websites: Academic: http://biology.appstate.edu/faculty-staff/104 Personal: http://www.appstate.edu/~neufeldhs/index.html Fall Colors Academic: http://biology.appstate.edu/fall-colors Fall Colors Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FallColorGuy
