I hope you find this book useful in teaching statistics. When writing this book, I tried to follow the GAISE Standards (2014, January 05), which are:

• Emphasis statistical literacy and develop statistical understanding.
• Use real data.
• Stress conceptual understanding, rather than mere knowledge of procedure.
• Foster active learning in the classroom.
• Use technology for developing concepts and analyzing data.

To this end, I ask students to interpret the results of their calculations. I incorporated the use of technology for most calculations. Because of that you will not find me using any of the computational formulas for standard deviations or correlation and regression since I prefer students understand the concept of these quantities. Also, because I utilize technology you will not find the standard normal table, Student’s t-table, binomial table, chi-square distribution table, and F-distribution table in the book. The only tables I provided were for critical values for confidence intervals since they are more difficult to find using technology. Another difference between this book and other statistics books is the order of hypothesis testing and confidence intervals. Most books present confidence intervals first and then hypothesis tests. I find that presenting hypothesis testing first and then confidence intervals is more understandable for students. Lastly, I have deemphasized the use of the z-test. In fact, I only use it to introduce hypothesis testing, and never utilize it again. You may also notice that when I introduced hypothesis testing and confidence intervals, proportions were introduced before means. However, when two sample tests and confidence intervals are introduced I switched this order. This is because usually many instructors do not discuss the proportions for two samples.

However, you might try assigning problems for proportions without discussing it in class. After doing two samples for means, the proportions are similar. Lastly, to aid student understanding and interest, most of the homework and examples utilize real data. Again, I hope you find this book useful for your introductory statistics class.