Learning objectives
1. Knowledge and understanding. Students will achieve a solid understanding of descriptive statistics and of its use in basic and applied research.
2. Application of knowlege and understanding. Students will be able to use the R programming environment to describe simple data structures and to create graphical presentations.
3. Autonomy of judgment. Students will refine critical thinking and autonomy of judgment in relation to data description in technical reports.
4.Communication skills. Students will be able to communicate the results of descriptive data analyses, both by numeric summary statistics and by graphical tools.
5. Learning skills. Students will develop the ability to learn new techniques for data description especially within the R programming environment.
Prerequisites
none
Course unit content
The course will present basic notions of measurement theory and univariate and bivariate descriptive statistics, with applications to research in psychobiology and cognitive neurosciences. The course also introduces to the R programming environment for statistical analysis and data presentation.
Full programme
Measurement theory. Precision and accuracy. Data. Univariate distribution. Central tendency and dispersion. Histograms and box-plots. Linear correlation. Regression. Scatterplots and bag-plots. Smoothers. Contingency tables. Association with categories. Multidimensional data structures. Central Limit theorem and the law of large numbers, sampling, confidence intervals. Contemporary debate on statistical testing.
Bibliography
All training materials are made available on the Elly page of the course.
The student can download the course notes, slides, exercises.
Furthermore, the following texts are recommended:
Chiorri, C. (2010). Fondamenti di psicometria. McGraw-HIll. (pp.1-250 e 387-460).
Venables, W.N., Smith, D.M. and the R Core Team (2012). An introduction to R. http://www.r-project.org/ (optional, recommended for students that do not come to class)
Teaching methods
Lectures will be held on-site in compliance with safety standards. Supporting material will be available on the specific, student-reserved platform (Elly) and will include slide presentations and / or audio-video supports.
Assessment methods and criteria
Written exam, with two open theory questions on the entire program, and an exercise in the R environment. The exercise involves the analysis of data that will be made available (through Elly) no later than 48 hours before the test. The analyzes will include a first part relating to descriptive statistics on the data and two subsequent parts in which inferential hypothesis tests will be required. In addition to the correct execution of the statistics, the ability to adequately interpret and comment on the outputs of the analyzes will be considered an essential part for the purpose of sufficiency. The evaluation out of thirty will be as follows:
first theory question: 0-8 points; second theory question: 0-8 points
exercise: 0-14 points, divided as follows:
first part 0-4 points;
second part 0-5 points;
third part 0-5 points.
The student may ask that the exam be supplemented by an oral test, provided that the outcome of the written test is sufficient. The oral exam is structured in a similar way to the written exam: questions related to the contents of the entire program and a short exercise in R environment on data used for the exercises during the course.
Students with SLD / BSE must first contact Le Eli-che: support for students with disabilities, D.S.A., B.E.S. (http://cai.unipr.it/it/le-eli-che/42/)
Other information
The execution of the proposed exercises is strongly recommended; it is recommended to contact the teacher to verify their correctness.
