How to do statistical analysis in excel ap biology

#How to do statistical analysis in excel ap biology how to#
#How to do statistical analysis in excel ap biology pdf#

The flies were polymorphic at the genetic locus that codes for the enzyme phosphoglucomutase (PGM). Verrelli and Eanes (2001) measured glycogen content in Drosophila melanogaster individuals. Here's an example of how the procedure works. If you just slap together an experiment without thinking about how you're going to do the statistics, you may end up needing more complicated and obscure statistical tests, getting results that are difficult to interpret and explain to others, and maybe using too many subjects (thus wasting your resources) or too few subjects (thus wasting the whole experiment). If you do this, you'll have an experiment that is easy to understand, easy to analyze and interpret, answers the questions you're trying to answer, and is neither too big nor too small.

You should do a lot of thinking, planning, and decision-making before you do an experiment. One important point for you to remember: 'do the experiment' is step 9, not step 1. Communicate your results effectively, usually with a graph or table.ДЄs you work your way through this textbook, you'll learn about the different parts of this process.Apply the statistical test you chose, and interpret the results.If it doesn't, choose a more appropriate test. Examine the data to see if it meets the assumptions of the statistical test you chose (primarily normality and homoscedasticity for tests of measurement variables).

If possible, do a power analysis to determine a good sample size for the experiment.

Based on the number of variables, the kinds of variables, the expected fit to the parametric assumptions, and the hypothesis to be tested, choose the best statistical test to use.

Design an experiment that controls or randomizes the confounding variables.

Determine what kind of variable each one is.

Determine which variables are relevant to the question.

Put the question in the form of a statistical null hypothesis and alternate hypothesis.

Put the question in the form of a biological null hypothesis and alternate hypothesis.

Specify the biological question you are asking.

#How to do statistical analysis in excel ap biology how to#

I find that a systematic, step-by-step approach is the best way to decide how to analyze biological data. How to determine the appropriate statistical test If you decide you want to use R let me know and I can direct you do a couple helpful resources / answer questions about conducting a meta-analysis in R.Here I describe how you should determine the best way to analyze your biological experiment. Check out the PRIMSA statement on info to report in the meta-analysis too.ДЇor R, Metafor is a great package but R is a little tricky to pick up at first. I am sure there are other good books out there, I just can't speak to them.ДЇor basic info, Jamie DeCoster's lecture notes on meta-analyses are helpful for the basics ( ), and Cochrane has a lot of info. The former will be a little easier to understand if you are new to meta-analyses. If you are planning on buying or renting a book, I recommend Applied Meta-Analysis for Social Science Researchers (Card), or the Rosenthal book mentioned above.

#How to do statistical analysis in excel ap biology pdf#

You can probably do this in Excel easily enough, but Excel will quickly become cumbersome, pick up a pdf of one of the many excellent intro books to R online and you should be able to get the hang of it by September for all of your needs (I recommend The Art of R Programming and A First Course in Statistical Programming in R - depending on how hard of a time of it you have, you may only need to skim them).ДЄs fas as how to do it in excel, this paper ( ) is really helpful and not nearly as scary as it looks at first glance. There are better statistical methods to use, but before you worry about those, this might be a good confidence boost). We trust studies more that have smaller standard errors, so take all of the means of the studies and weight their means by the standard error (standard error = standard deviation/sqrt(sample size)), this will give you a preliminary estimate of the overall mean. You have all the information right in front of you to do a basic version of this (although we would probably prefer more information, for instance the data itself so we could use a Bootstrap or similar to calculate standard error), and so it might raise your confidence to try this. What you want to do is get an overarching value for the mean for any population. Your supervisor should be able to provide more direction, but assuming your datasets all do the same thing (not true if you're doing a meta-analysis in ecology or evolution say) and there's no secondary factors that you have to consider (a big assumption).