Editorial Team

Anita Walz is Associate Professor and Assistant Director of Open Education and Scholarly Communication Librarian in the University Libraries at Virginia Tech. She received her MS in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has worked in university, government, school, and international libraries for eighteen years. She is the founder of the Open Education Initiative at Virginia Tech and the managing editor of several open textbooks adapted or created at Virginia Tech, many of which may be found by visiting VTechWork’s Open Textbook Collection. For Significant Statistics, she provided overall planning, project coordination, day-to-day supervision, and oversight.

Kindred Grey is the Graphic Design and Publishing Specialist in the University Libraries at Virginia Tech. She joined University Libraries after receiving her BS in Statistics and Psychology from Virginia Tech in 2020. Kindred has contributed to over twenty open textbooks, providing technical support on layout and design. Her main focus is publishing open textbooks that are visually appealing, accessible, student oriented, and technologically advanced.

Reviewers

Thank you to Ilhan Izmirli and Katherine Bowe for taking time to review and comment on this resource, ensuring its usefulness as a learning tool for instructors and students.

Project Funding

Development of this book was made possible in part through a grant from the University Libraries at Virginia Tech’s Open Education Initiative.

Sources

Significant Statistics: An Introduction to Statistics is adapted by John Morgan Russell from open textbooks from OpenStax and OpenIntro. These source books are released under open licenses that allow reuse and remix at no cost with attribution. Additional topics, examples, and innovations in terminology and practical applications have been added, all with a goal of increasing relevance and accessibility for students.

Content for this book was gathered and adapted from multiple openly-licensed sources:

• OpenStax Introductory Statistics by Barbara Illowsky and Susan Dean, which is licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) license

• OpenIntro Statistics by David Diez, Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel, and Christopher D. Barr, which is licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 (CC BY SA 3.0) license

• Introductory Statistics for the Life and Biomedical Sciences by Julie Vu and David Harrington, which is licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 (CC BY SA 3.0) license

The base of the book is from OpenStax, much of which was reworded and reorganized. The main reorganizations involved streamlining the probability chapter (Chapter 3), removing ancillary discrete (Chapter 4) and continuous (Chapter 5) distribution sections, introducing normal distribution (5.3) in the continuous distributions chapter, and removing the chi-square and ANOVA chapters.

Additional content from the OpenIntro texts was then added to fill in gaps. This included adding more detailed information on data collection (1.3 & 1.4), normal approximation (5.3), and inferential techniques applied to proportions (7.3). Several figures were also adapted from the OpenIntro texts.