Develop project material for intro to data science course

In this project, you will develop new project materials for the course STAT310 Fundamental Concepts of Statistics. 

About the course 

STAT310 Fundamental Concepts of Statistics is typically one of the first statistics courses students take to learn about fundamental principles of statistical science and how to use data to investigate a question of interest.  Students learn how to formulate an inquiry into a model or a hypothesis, explore a data set through visualization and descriptive statistics, make inference using relevant data and appropriate statistical methods, and communicate your observations and findings. The course uses the textbook Statistical Inference via Data Science A ModernDive into R and the Tidyverse, and uses R language to demonstrate statistical concepts including point estimate, sampling variation, confidence interval, hypothesis testing, and linear regression. 

Course project

Throughout the semester, students apply new concepts to analyze a real world data and answer a question of their interest. A project involves introducing motivation and background, data description, visualization and summary, hypothesis testing and building multivariate linear models to explore relationships between variables. 

What data do students analyze currently

Currently students can analyze either the COVID-19 data to explore factors associated with COVID-19 infection in US counties, or the Open Policing data to study trends and patterns in police stops. 

What will you do in this project

You will be developing a new project, that is, you will find a new dataset and explore a few possible project questions. You will visualize the data, and analyze it to answer your questions. The project you develop will be added to the course in the next iteration. Examples of data include National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data or American Time Use Survey.

What I expect from you

This project will be 4 hours/week * 6 weeks during the summer. I expect you to turn in an R markdown file each week summarizing your work. At the end of six weeks, I expect you to turn in a final writeup of the project materials you have developed. 

What you can expect from me

I will guide you through your project, and provide suggestions and feedback on the materials you have developed. I respect, value, and encourage your perspective, and will acknowledge your work when using your material. I will aim to meet with you once a week.