Introductory Statistics

Creating and Using a Flowchart

One skill that needs to be obtained is to distill readings into some useful picture. The following is a flowchart for the one-sample mean procedure. Start at “Start Here.” Follow the arrows. At each diamond, make the decision and follow the correct arrow.

If this helps, I strongly suggest you create one for each analysis type taught in this course. It will help you. In fact, learning statistics all but requires that you create flowcharts like these and learn them. As expected in college, you will want to understand the process in terms of the probability distributions.

Work your way through this flowchart several times to ensure you have learned it. That will help you avoid needing to refer to it in the future. Alternatively, to make learning this easier, you should learn the reason underlying the decisions in the procedure above. Statistics are based on probability assumptions. Understanding those assumptions and how they affect the distribution of the test statistic is a fantastic first step to a deeper understanding of statistical analysis.