Collaborative Statistics

Collaborative Statistics was written by Barbara Illowsky and Susan Dean, faculty members at De Anza Collegein Cupertino, California. The textbook was developed over several years and has been used in regularand honors-level classroom settings and in distance learning classes. Courses using this textbook have beenarticulated by the University of California for transfer of credit. The textbook contains full materials forcourse offerings, including expository text, examples, labs, homework, and projects. A Teacher’s Guide iscurrently available in print form and on the Connexions site at and supplemental course materials including additional problem sets and video lectures are available. The on-line text for each of these collections collections willmeet the Section 508 standards for accessibility.

An on-line course based on the textbook was also developed by Illowsky and Dean. It has won an awardas the best on-line California community college course. The on-line course will be available at a later dateas a collection in Connexions, and each lesson in the on-line course will be linked to the on-line textbookchapter. The on-line course will include, in addition to expository text and examples, videos of courselectures in captioned and non-captioned format.

The original preface to the book as written by professors Illowsky and Dean, now follows:

This book is intended for introductory statistics courses being taken by students at two– and four–yearcolleges who are majoring in fields other than math or engineering. Intermediate algebra is the only prerequisite.The book focuses on applications of statistical knowledge rather than the theory behind it. Thetext is named Collaborative Statistics because students learn best by doing. In fact, they learn best byworking in small groups. The old saying “two heads are better than one” truly applies here.