Professor of Biostatistics, Emeritus Dave Harrington and Julie Vu, Preceptor in Statistics in the Statistics Department at FAS, have published the first edition of their open source text Introductory Statistics for the Life and Biomedical Sciences.
The text has been written to be used in conjunction with a set of self-paced learning labs. These labs guide students through learning how to apply statistical ideas and concepts discussed in the text with the R computing language.
The text discusses the important ideas used to support an interpretation (such as the notion of a confidence interval), rather than the process of generating such material from data (such as computing a confidence interval for a particular subset of individuals in a study). This allows students whose main focus is understanding statistical concepts to not be distracted by the details of a particular software package. In our experience, however, we have found that many students enter a research setting after only a single course in statistics. These students benefit from a practical introduction to data analysis that incorporates the use of a statistical computing language.
The text is visible and can be downloaded at OpenIntro.org.
For links to the source files for the book, please contact Dave at davidharrington@g.harvard.edu
