This course focuses on the investigative process of answering research questions with data. Cadets gain practical experience asking research questions, designing studies and collecting data, exploring data, conducting inference, and discussing the scope and limitations of their findings. Through data analysis labs and class explorations, they critically assess statistical findings reported in scientific journals and perform analyses of their own. Specific topics include hypothesis testing/confidence intervals (one and two sample means and proportions using both simulation-based methods like randomization tests and theory-based methods like t-tests), generalizability (random sampling vs. convenience sampling), causality (experiments vs observational studies), confounding, and linear regression (simple and multiple with interactions). R programming is integrated throughout the course.
