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This is the web site I used while teaching Statistics 110 at Winona State University in 1999 and 2000. It was a first statistics class (and probably the only statistics class) taken by primarily Freshmen and Sophomores, many of them Nursing majors.

My goal was that the students would become critical consumers of statistics when they got through with my class, questioning every statistic they read. To this end I really wanted them to understand random versus representative samples and observational versus designed experiments. I wanted them to understand the idea of a hypothesis test and decision making in statistics. And variance. And probability. Really quite a lot now that I think about it.

I tried hard to have relevant and interesting studies to critique and data to analyze. A couple favorite subjects were death penalty statistics and the scientific study of prayer on healing. We discussed any interesting statistic we ran into on television, in magazines or in newspapers. I loved talking about The Median Isn't The Method by Stephan Jay Gould, which was his analysis of the prognosis that he had 8 months to live.