202-202 Experimental Design/Statistical Methods

Upon completion of the subject, students should be able to:

• recognise, understand and apply the basic concepts of study design, such as observational studies versus designed experiments, confounding, replication, randomisation, and blocking, and discuss the effect of the design concepts on the interpretation of results;

• recognise and apply basic study designs like completely randomised one and two factor and randomised block designs;

• make and interpret appropriate graphs and tables for data from one and two factor designs;

• display an understanding of the basics of statistical models such as predictions, residuals, parameters, estimation, and the normal distribution;

• formulate models for simple one and two factor designs, including interaction, and interpret them in terms of the data;

• state the assumptions of simple models and use the data and residuals to check these assumptions;

• and display an understanding of the purpose and limitation of inference, and be able to use the main tools of inference to learn about data.

Topics include:

• one- and two-way ANOVA, simple linear and multiple regression, t-tests, confidence intervals and multiple comparisons;

• use of the statistics package Minitab to carry out the analyses described above;

• and the interpretation of output in terms of the agricultural context.

A three-hour examination (60%) and two assignments equivalent to 3000 words (worth 40%).