Wednesday, 25 March 2015

Re-arranging an equation: making a variable the subject

We've just released a Getting Started Guide on how to re-arrange an equation. This complements materials we have in the Building Blocks Series.

If you have any questions, please contact learningservices@ucs.ac.uk


Monday, 23 March 2015

Statistics Guide for Beginners: Maureen Haaker

Are you looking for help around statistics?

If yes, the following resource was written by Maureen Haaker, a Lecturer in the Dept of Children, Young People and Education (Faculty of Arts, Business and Applied Social Science), and she has kindly shared it with us;


With thanks - Image - http://support2.dundas.com/OnlineDocumentation/RSChart/images/Distribution_T.png 

Sunday, 25 January 2015

Descriptive & Inferential Stats ... plus a few other things

This post is informed by a Level 5 Adult Nurse student who asked the question as an outcome of the module she is studying on Research for Practice (Qualitative Methods and Tools).

What is the difference between descriptive and inferential statistics?

Descriptive Stats: In more depth

This video gives some really useful background to the different types of data, based on examples, what tests you can perform based on the type of data, and how to apply it to your research or when reading research papers.

Monday, 5 January 2015

UEA Online Maths Support: A great starting place

Increasingly, people are using the Internet and YouTube to help them with their Maths. We'd strongly encourage this move as there is a wealth of information available. Therefore, to help you get to navigate this wealth of knowledge, we are recommending a good starting point for your journey is the following source. The reason being it offers excellent coverage, it is easy to navigate to the information areas, and the majority of the guides are available as videos.

The University of East Anglia's Learning Enhancement Team: Maths

Sunday, 7 December 2014

Monthly Video: Hypothesis Testing (small sample - t test)

A requirement is the use of statistics to help us either accept or reject a hypothesis (A hypothesis is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. For a hypothesis to be a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it. Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis).

The accepting or rejecting of a Null Hypothesis, often involves a T Test (where the sample is less than 30) or a Z Test (where the sample is greater than 30).

The following video walks through an illustration of what this means and how to complete a T Test. Although the software application often calculates the actual number, it is really useful for us to understand how it is calculated to help our interpretation. The following video is from the Khan Academy (https://www.khanacademy.org/).


If you have any questions, please email learningservices@ucs.ac.uk

Monday, 24 November 2014

Student Request: Converting a fraction into a decimal

In response to a session I ran the other day, I thought the following Khan Academy video would be really useful for those who are looking at refreshing on how to convert a fraction into a decimal. It is also really useful as it explains how to convert a decimal into a fraction :-)

If you have any questions around Maths Support, please email learningservices@ucs.ac.uk







Thanks - http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Ybc7289-bw.jpg

Thursday, 20 November 2014

Monthly video: Interpreting p values

Currently, one of the most frequent requests we receive is around, "what is a p value? what does it mean?".

The following videos have been selected to answer the following questions; 
  1. what is a p-value?
  2. when and where are thy used?
  3. what do they show?
The videos use lots of terminology, a key one to remember, is "Null hypothesis, refers to a general statement or default position that there is no relationship between two measured phenomena." If we reject the Null hypothesis, (indicated by a low p-value) we can accept the alternate hypothesis"

Video 1:


Video 2: Looks at it from the perspective of the hypothesis


More YouTube explanations are available from: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=interpreting+p+values 

If you have any questions, please email learningservices@ucs.ac.uk

If you are using Google Sheets, there is a template to allow you to calculate a Z and T Test, which produces the p values. For more information, see

Thanks - Image Source - http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/00/P-value_Graph.png