Business Statistics A First Course

Educational Philosophy In our many years of teaching introductory statistics courses, we have continually searched for ways to improve the teaching of these courses. Our vision for teaching these introductory business statistics courses has been shaped by active participation in a series of Making Statistics More Effective in Schools of Business, Decision Sciences Institute, and American Statistical Association conferences as well as the reality of serving a diverse group of students at large universities. Over the years, our vision has come to include these principles: Students need a frame of reference when learning statistics, especially since statistics is not their major. That frame of reference for business students should be the functional areas of business--that is, accounting, economics and finance, information systems, management, and marketing. Each statistical topic needs to be presented in an applied context related to at least one of these functional areas. Virtually all the students taking introductory business statistics courses are majoring in areas other than statistics. Introductory courses should focus on underlying principles that nonstatistics majors will find useful. The use of spreadsheet and/or statistical software should be integrated into all aspects of an introductory statistics course. In the workplace, spreadsheet software (and sometimes statistical software) is usually available on a decision maker's desktop. Our teaching approach needs to recognize this reality, and we need to make our courses consistent with the workplace environment. Textbooks that use software must provide enough instructions that students can effectively use the software, without the software (and instruction) dominating the course. The focus in teaching each topic should be on the application of the topic to a functional area of business, the interpretation of results, the presentation of assumptions, the evaluation of the assumptions, and the discussion of what should be done if the assumptions are violated. These points are particularly important in regression and forecasting and in hypothesis testing. Although the illustration of some computations is inevitable, the focus on computations should be minimized. Both classroom examples and homework exercises should relate to actual or realistic data as much as possible. Students should work with data sets, both small and large, and be encouraged to look beyond the statistical analysis of data to the interpretation of results in a managerial context. Introductory courses should avoid an overconcentration on one topic area (such as hypothesis testing) and instead provide breadth of coverage of a variety of statistical topics. This will help students avoid the "I can't see the forest from the trees" syndrome. New to This Edition This new third edition ofBusiness Statistics: A First Coursehas been vastly improved in a number of important areas. APPLICATIONS Updated and improvedUsing Statisticsbusiness scenarios--Each chapter begins with a "Using Statistics" example that shows how statistics can be used in one of the functional areas of business--accounting, finance, information systems, management, or marketing. This scenario (and in some cases an additional scenario) is used throughout the chapter to provide an applied context for the concepts. Hundreds of new applied examples and exercises, with data from theWall Street Journal, USA Today,and other sources have been added to the text. Visual Explorations--Provided on the book's accompanying CD-ROM are visual explorations that allow students to interactively explore important statistical concepts in descriptive statistics, probability, the normal distribution, and regression analysis. For exampLevine, David M. is the author of 'Business Statistics A First Course' with ISBN 9780130782014 and ISBN 0130782017.