Customer Reviews:
 Review from an Instructor's Perspective. November 23, 2008
Farshid Arjomandi (California, USA)
After having used Mario Triola's Essentials of Statistics to teach my prior two classes, this semester at a new college I had the opportunity to adapt Larson & Farber in an elementary statistics course for the first time. As has become the trend lately, we have been using Pearson's accompanying Course Compass web-based program for enhancing the class activities, for example the students submit all their homework online, access tutorials, animations, video clips, and also have access to the entire collection of the textbook pages in an electronic format. The topics in Larson & Farber proceed very much along the other comparable standard books such as Triola and Moore, starting out with descriptive statistics, then covering probability and distributions (binomial, normal, Poisson), and finally moving to inferential statistics in the form of building confidence intervals, hypothesis testing (for means, populations, variances), and correlation/regression. There is also another chapter covering Chi-Square Goodness of Fit, and the basics of ANOVA using F-distribution. Larson & Farber then finish with the 11th chapter on nonparametric methods meanwhile including extra information within exercises and marginal notes, providing a plethora of interesting reading which serve to enhance the knowledge base of the readers. I have been able to cover most of the material in the first 10 chapters within a single academic semester and the majority of the twenty-something students have been keeping along and showing interest in the subject.
The students and I have kept handy our TI 83/84 calculators for many of the exercises; in a couple of places however, MINITAB is the program of choice. For example when building prediction intervals or performing multiple regression, since the TI calculators do not come equipped with a built-in program to perform such operations. The latest 4th edition contains some maiden features in the form of newly included chapter summaries, applet activities, discussions on uses and abuses of statistical techniques, cumulative reviews at the end of selected chapters, technology answers, and revised course coverage in certain chapters (for example in chapter 2, clusters and gaps were added to the measures of central tendency, and in chapter 7, the power of a test has been defined.) The authors have noted they have aimed to strike a balance between computations, decision making, and conceptual understanding, at the same time continuing to incorporate the graphical display of data throughout the text. Also the book adheres to the MAA, AMATYC, and NCTM standards which call for a student-friendly text emphasizing the applications of statistics. Additionally, there are student resources available which for example include chapter quiz prep videos on a CD-ROM, student solutions manual, and technology manual. In summary, Larson & Farber have put together an excellent resource for learning and teaching statistics which promises to have an impact both in the classroom and the academic markets in the future to come.
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