Understanding Educational Statistics Using Microsoft Excel and SPSS / Edition 1

by Martin Lee Abbott

Overview

Utilizing the latest software, this book presents the essential statistical procedures for drawing valuable results from data in the social sciences.

Mobilizing interesting real-world examples from the field of education, Understanding Educational Statistics Using Microsoft Excel and SPSS supplies a seamless presentation that identifies valuable connections between statistical applications and research design. Class-tested to ensure an accessible presentation, the book combines clear, step-by-step explanations and the use of software packages that are accessible to both the novice and professional alike to present the fundamental statistical practices for organizing, understanding, and drawing conclusions from educational research data.

The book begines with an introduction to descriptive and inferential statistics and then proceeds to acquaint readers with the various functions for working with quantitative data in the Microsoft Excel environment, such as spreadsheet navigation; sorting and filtering; and creating pivot tables. Subsequent chapters treat the procedures that are commonly-employed when working with data across various fields of social science research, including:

• Single-sample tests
• Repeated measure tests
• Independent t-tests
• One way ANOVA and factorial ANOVA
• Correlation
• Bivariate regression
• Chi square
• Multiple regression

Individual chapters are devoted to specific procedures, each ending with a lab exercise that highlights the importance of that procedure by posing a research question, examining the question through its application in Excel and SPSS, and concluding with a brief research report that outlines key findings drawn from the results. Real-world examples and data from modern educational research are used throughout the book, and a related Web site features additional data sets, examples, and labs, allowing readers to reinforce their comprehension of the material.

Bridging traditional statistical topics with the latest software and applications in the field of education, Understanding Educational Statistics Using Microsoft Excel and SPSS is an excellent book for courses on educational research methods and introductory statistics in the social sciences at the upper-undergraduate and graduate levels. It also serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in the fields of education, psychology, and the social sciences who require a statistical background to work with data in their everyday work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780470889459
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	09/13/2011
Pages:	552
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

MARTIN LEE ABBOTT, PhD, is Professor of Sociology at Seattle Pacific University, where he also serves as Executive Director of the Washington School Research Center, an independent research and data analysis center funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He has held positions in both academia and in industry, focusing his consulting and teaching in the areas of program evaluation, applied sociology, statistics, and research methods. Dr. Abbott is the author of The Program Evaluation Prism: Using Statistical Methods to Discover Patterns (Wiley).

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Table of Contents

Preface xix

Acknowledgments xxi

1 Introduction 1

2 Getting Acquainted with Microsoft Excel1 7

3 Using Statistics in Excel1 17

4 SPSS1 Basics 23

5 Descriptive Statistics—Central Tendency 41

6 Descriptive Statistics—Variablity 81

7 The Normal Distribution 101

8 The Z Distribution and Probability 127

9 The Nature of Research Design and Inferential Statistics 147

10 The T Test for Single Samples 175

11 Independent-Samples T Test 209

12 Analysis of Variance 257

13 Factorial Anova 307

14 Correlation 337

15 Bivariate Regression 383

16 Introduction to Multiple Linear Regression 429

17 Chi Square and Contingency Table Analysis 453

18 Repeated Measures Procedures: Tdep and ANOVAws 489

References 511

Appendix: Statistical Tables 513

Index 523