Using JMP to Teach Business Statistics Courses
Dr. Marlene A. Smith, University of Colorado Denver
I’ve begun writing a collection of cases that use JMP to teach statistics to business students. “Case” means that a business or economic scenario and data set are posed to students, who are then challenged to use the data to enlighten the business problem. The scenarios and data come from real or realistic business settings designed to overcome a common student phobia of statistics as an unneeded and torturous core course. The cases contain both cross-sectional and time-series data sets, so that students become familiar with methods appropriate to each. The topical coverage of the collection includes marketing, real estate, non-profit strategic management, human resources management, macroeconomics, and operations management. The statistical coverage in the collection includes topics generally seen in today’s MBA statistics curriculum: descriptive statistics and graphs, sampling distributions, one- and multi-sample means tests and confidence intervals, forecasting, model building with simple and multiple regression, and data mining. Each of the cases in the collection follows a standard format: the problem and task is outlined and the data set characteristics are detailed. A step-by-step analysis of the data follows. To highlight the message that we do statistics for a reason, each case ends with a summary of what management has learned from the analysis of the data.