I agree with John Hall's post quoting Tukey. Most of these students will never write a line of code in their work life. The opportunity to use statistics as a tool to answer questions is important as long as they know the right questions to ask. I think that an MBA student would be well served to learn about the question, the instruments and methods used to gather data, or the quality of the data itself. In a business environment, the data we have is often not the data we want or need. The data we need is often unavailable.  So some basic statistical methods are important, but it is equally important for students to understand what these conclusions mean or what they do not mean.
Orlando

On Fri, Nov 11, 2011 at 4:33 AM, John F Hall <johnfhall@orange.fr> wrote:

This article is worth a look as well:

 

20 Questions A Journalist Should Ask About Poll Results

http://www.ncpp.org/?q=node/4

 

I always worry about MBA-type courses: they seem to churn people through stats/spss modules, who may well collect their assessment marks, but afterwards have learned practically nothing about statistics or research methods.  As John Tukey once said, “All the statistics in the world won’t save you if you  asked the wrong question in the first place”

 

John F Hall

 

johnfhall@orange.fr

www.surveyresearch.weebly.com

 

 

 

 

From: SPSSX(r) Discussion [mailto:SPSSX-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Gosse, Michelle
Sent: 10 November 2011 21:08
To: SPSSX-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Statistics Teaching Questions [SEC: UNCLASSIFIED]

 

I agree with what Art has to say below. The worst thing you could do is have them finish the course and think they are statisticians.

 

An awful lot of my work through various jobs has been data cleaning and manipulating, to get data into the correct form in which to analyse. If you could also pass onto them that statistics isn’t just sitting in front of a computer and having the program spit out the correct results, but that – in many cases – most of the time will be in cleaning data and a minor portion will be analysing/reporting, that would be helpful as well.

 

Do any of them need to be able to interpret published statistics, e.g. in journal articles? If so, this book might be helpful in teaching them what detail should be available in the publication:

http://www.amazon.com/Reviewers-Quantitative-Methods-Social-Sciences/dp/041596508X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320955079&sr=8-1

 

I also liked books along this line for showing how important good statistics are, how easily people can be fooled by “common sense” and/or bad statistical practice, and are easy reads: http://www.amazon.com/Risk-John-Adams/dp/1857280687/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1320955190&sr=1-2 or http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Science-Quacks-Pharma-Flacks/dp/0771035799/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1320955405&sr=1-2

 

There will be a lot of possible books out there for you, it comes back to what you want to achieve in your course.

 

Cheers

Michelle

 

 

 

 

UNCLASSIFIED

From: SPSSX(r) Discussion [mailto:SPSSX-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Art Kendall
Sent: Friday, 11 November 2011 3:46 AM
To: SPSSX-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Statistics Teaching Questions

 

I do not have a textbook to recommend.

I strongly recommend that you make something like the following  goals of your teaching and to communicate this to the students.
" We cannot give you a graduate degree and years of experience in a single course. Major goals of this course are 1) to help you know when you should see a statistical/methodological consultant 2) provide sufficient background that you can work efficiently and effectively with statistical/methodological consultants."

For your background I suggest "statistics as principled argument"
you can find it, e.g., at http://www.amazon.com/Statistics-Principled-Argument-Robert-Abelson/dp/0805805281
It can help you decide what to emphasize in your course. Knowing why things are done in analysis is very important as it is in other processes like manufacturing.

Also, I have often had good results by having students "reference" each others' syntax.  This is a quality assurance practice from accounting and program evaluation.  This means going through the syntax and checking whether it does what it purports to do.  This helps the students internalize the importance or writing (and rewriting) syntax so that others can understand it.  The use of syntax also helps students act as a "help desk" for each other.

Art Kendall
Social Research Consultants


On 11/10/2011 9:08 AM, David Futrell wrote:

Hi Everyone:

I'm going to be teaching a statistics course next semester for MBA Students. Most of these students are adults with actual jobs.

Since these folks are going to be managers (and not statisticians), I want to focus the course on helping them understand data and how statistics and analyses can help them solve relevant business problems. I'm hoping to use SPSS for the course (I haven't gotten a ruling from the university yet), but where I really need some advice is regarding a textbook. There are hundreds (many dozens, anyway) of business statistics textbooks and I'm going to have to pick one within the next few days. Do any of you have any recommendations for the text or any web resources for teaching a practical statistics class for MBA students?

Thanks,
David Futrell

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