University students in guidance and counselling come to their first course in statistics with diverse expectations and backgrounds in mathematics.
Some have considerable formal training and quantitative aptitude and look forward to learn statistics.
Others-perhaps the majority, including some of those who inspire to postgraduate studies are less confident in their quantitative skills.
They regard a course in statistics as a necessary evil to the understanding or carrying out of research in their chosen fields.
But an evil nonetheless. This third edition, like the predecessor is directed primarily at the latter audience.
It was written with the conviction that statistical concepts can be described without loss of accuracy and that understanding of statistical techniques as research tools can be effectively promoted by discussing them within the context of their application to concrete data rather than pure abstractions.
Furthermore, its contents are limited to those statistical techniques that are widely used in the literature of guidance and counselling and to the results . of our teaching experience and the principles underlying them.
The changes that have been made in this edition reflect both the results of our teaching experience and the increasing prominence being given by statisticians to certain topics.
Thus, our increasing discussions of some procedures, articularly those in the realm of descriptive statistics which students grasp easily, have been shortened or rearranged.
The treatment of other topics has been expanded. Greater emphasis has been placed on sampling theory, hypothesis, testing and the notion of statistical power.
A proper title of the above passage should be ____________
A. statistics for guidance counsels B. introductory statistics C. statistical analysis for university student's prominent statistician D. preface
