Level: Foundation (F)

The purpose of this course is to help participants understand some basic statistical concepts and develop a strategy for approaching simple data analysis. The course will introduce basic concepts such as hypothesis testing and confidence interval estimation. It will provide the tools to undertake simple analysis of a dataset and will include some helpful hints and tips for reading and understanding reported statistics.

Delegates will be given a small amount of precourse materials to help them prepare for the course, and will be expected to bring a laptop to the course.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course, participants will understand basic approaches to statistical inference, including hypothesis testing and confidence interval estimation. They will be equipped with the skills necessary to undertake simple analysis and to understand some of the basic terms often used to report statistical results. The course will mainly use calculations by hand to aid understanding, but will include outputs from Excel and other free statistical software for some statistical tests.

Topics Covered

Day 1: The normal distribution, basic study design,data summary, confidence intervals, introduction to hypothesis tests,analysis of contingency tables - the chi-squared test.

Day 2: T-tests, non parametric tests, (Wilcoxon signed rank test, Mann-Whitney U test), correlation and regression, basic presentation of data and results.

Target Audience

This course is aimed at those who have either never undertaken a formal statistics course, or who have studied some statistics in the past but wish to undertake a refresher. It is ideal for statistical novices who have never had any formal training but are starting to encounter statistics in their work and wish to gain some insight. Experience of using Excel is an advantage but not essential as some examples of analysis in Excel and other free software will be demonstrated.

Delegate Feedback

"Ellen and Jenny were extremely knowledgeable. They were also approachable and happy to give further explanations when necessary"

"Excellent course. Hard to fault. I can see why it's popular"

"This was a fantastic course, the presenters had a very high knowledge but were able to 'dumb it down' for me as I am new to this"

This is the face-to-face delivery of our Basic Statistics course, running over 2 days. We are also delivering this course through other formats, please click here to see the different options.

Ellen Marshall

Ellen Marshall is the statistics co-ordinator in the Maths and Statistics Help Centre (MASH) at Sheffield University. Ellen has extensive experience of giving students one-to-one help with the statistics required for their studies and in writing and presenting workshops on statistics at all levels and different groups of people. Previous experience includes 10 years of teaching statistics to non-statisticians, inter-disciplinary research associate positions and statistical consultancy. Winner of two awards for learning and teaching: Innovation in Academic skills development (internal-students union award) & Sigma Outstanding Contributor in the field of Maths and Statistics Support (national) listed presenters for assistance during worked examples or computing practicals.

Fees		Registration before  2 June 2025	Registration on/after 2 June 2025
Non Member  RSS Fellow  RSS CStat/Gradstat/Data Analyst  also MIS & FIS		£714.00+vat  £608.00+vat  £573.00+vat	£795.00+vat  £675.00+vat  £635.00+vat
Group discounts are also available*: 3-5 people 6-8 people 9+ people *Discount only applies to non-member price		10% discount 15% discount 20% discount