Teaching statistics has been a major focus
of my professional life throughout my career. When I took a class in
Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) from a fabled instructor, Norman H. Anderson,
I loved the course but hated the textbook. The material appealed to my
sense of order; I saw the elegant logic underlying factorial designs. But
the text was a 500+ page tome filled with arcane formulas. There seemed to
be no structure in the book, just one chapter after another filled with
increasingly more complicated expressions. So I ignored the book and
listened to the instructor very intently.
Over the years I taught the course, I
developed my own course notes and eschewed a textbook. Eventually
those notes became what is, in my humble opinion, the best ANOVA text in
the world. Students say it's a joy to read (or at least as joyful as a
statistics book can be). The examples are worked out in
detail, and the exercises are realistic in theme (albeit with small data
sets - I'm not teaching how to type numbers) and sometimes even amusingly written.
What makes this text a "Practical Guide", and
what distinguishes it from most other statistics texts, is that the
presentation is intended not to impress my peers, but instead to make
things clear to students to whom these concepts are new. The algebra is
kept to a minimum; I view ANOVA logic in terms of patterns rather than
formulas. It is written for people who want to know what to do and to
understand why the procedures make sense. It is pitched toward
psychologists and other behavioral scientists, not toward statisticians.
When Visual Basic became available, I wrote
my own suite of WINDOWS programs for ANOVA. I didn't like the commercial
programs; they seemed to require a separate course of their own. The most
popular program among psychologists, SPSS, is perhaps the worst offender.
I thought ANOVA software should be intuitive, easy to use. And the program
should not open with a blank screen!
My suite is called the
CALSTAT series,
named after the university where I have done my teaching. Students
universally produce correct tables within five minutes of opening the ONEWAY program. I can devote my class time to teaching statistics
rather than to teaching how to operate the program. Here's a screen
shot of the data entry window for the factorial ANOVA program (all of
the programs use the same interface).