Foundations in Statistical Reasoning

This book starts by presenting an overview of the statistical thought process. By the end of chapter 2, students are already familiar with concepts such as hypotheses, level of significance, p-values, errors. Normally these topics are not introduced until after a discussion of probability and sampling distributions. My approach to probability and sampling distributions is also very different. Because students using this book know about hypotheses before we reach the probability section, inferential theory can be developed by applying the probability rules the testing of a hypothesis. To me, this leads to better and more interesting questions than are typically asked in these sections and gives meaning to these concepts. Other differences include homework problems that require the integration of topics from different chapters as well as one problem in each chapter based on issues discussed in other classes on our campus (e.g. psychology, criminal justice, economics, etc).