• Unit 6: Conducting Experiments and Studies

    A recent study revealed that breast-fed babies have higher IQs than babies that were not breast-fed.

    What was your reaction to this study? Did you immediately think that any baby you ever have will be breast-fed so that he or she will have a high IQ? Or did you see that there are other issues to consider that the outcome did not address?

    Unit 6 will sharpen your ability to "talk back to a statistic.” You will learn the critical differences between a study and an experiment and how to understand the difference between a correlation between two variables and a cause-and-effect relationship between two variables. Big difference!

    You will learn about the importance of taking a representative sample from a population and how to design an experiment that measures what you really intend to measure. You will learn to consider issues affecting a study that may cloud your results.

    Completing this unit should take you approximately 5 hours.