To the Student:

 We hope that you will find statistics to be both an important and an engaging subject to study. We want you to be aware of three principles that guided our writing of this book; the first two relate to the study of statistics generally and third pertains to the distinctive nature of this book:

1. Statistics is not number-crunching.

Contrary to its popular perception, statistics involves much more than numerical computations. In this book you will be asked to concentrate on understanding statistical concepts and on interpreting and communicating the results of statistical analyses. In other words, you will be expected to learn to construct and analyze numerical arguments, using data to support your statements. In contrast to most mathematics courses, you will be using phrases such as "there is strong evidence that ..." and "the data suggest that ..." rather than "the exact answer is ..." and "it is therefore proven that ...". In order to allow you to better focus on this understanding and communication, you will use the computer program Minitab to alleviate computational drudgery. Minitab will also present the ideas in a visual, interactive environment, allowing you to more easily understand the concepts and their properties.

2. Statistics involves the analysis of genuine data.

Supporting our contention that statistics is applicable in everyday life and in most fields of academic endeavor, you will analyze genuine data from a wide variety of applications throughout the course. Many of these data sets involve information that you will collect about yourselves and your peers; others will come from sources such as almanacs, journals, magazines, newspapers, and books. We hope that by spanning a wide variety of subject matter, the contexts will be of interest to a general audience.

3. Understanding results from investigation and discovery.

The structure of this text asks you to spend most of your time actively engaged with the material as opposed to passively taking notes. The activities have been carefully designed and tested to lead you to discover fundamental statistical ideas for yourself, in collaboration with your peers, your instructor, and the computer. You should try to read very carefully, particularly the expository passages of the text which present the most important pieces of information, to supplement the knowledge that you construct.

 
Our advice to you for success in this course can be summed up in two words: think and participate. This course will ask you to think critically and to defend your arguments. Moreover, you will be asked to make guesses and collect data and draw conclusions and write summaries and discuss findings and explore alternatives and investigate scenarios and .... You must have an open and active mind in order to complete these tasks; in other words, you must accept responsibility for your own learning. Our responsibility as authors has been to provide you with a resource that will facilitate this learning process and lead you on the path toward understanding statistics.
 

Two final words of advice: Have fun! We sincerely hope that you will enjoy a dynamic and interactive learning environment as you study statistics!