An Adventure in Statistics
The Reality Enigma
- Andy Field - University of Sussex, UK
APEX Award 2023 for Publication Excellence: Print Media - Education & Training
Shortlisted for the British Psychological Society Book Award 2017
Shortlisted for the British Book Design and Production Awards 2016
Shortlisted for the Association of Learned & Professional Society Publishers Award for Innovation in Publishing 2016
Now in its second edition, An Adventure in Statistics: The Reality Enigma by best-selling author and award-winning teacher Andy Field offers a better way to learn statistics. It combines rock-solid statistics coverage with compelling visual storytelling to address the conceptual difficulties that students learning statistics for the first time often encounter in introductory courses. Students are guided away from rote memorization towards independent, critical thinking and problem solving.
This essential foundation to understanding statistics is woven into the unique action-packed story of Zach, who thinks, processes information and faces challenges to his understanding in the same way as a statistics novice. Illustrated with stunning, graphic novel-style art and featuring Socratic dialogue, the story captivates readers as it introduces them to concepts, eliminating potential statistics anxiety.
No previous statistics knowledge is presumed, and no use of data analysis software is required – everything you would expect for an introductory course is covered but with a contemporary twist, arming students with a strong grounding in understanding classical and Bayesian approaches to data analysis.
With its unique combination of story, concepts and terminology, this complete introduction to statistics from bestselling author Andy Field breaks the mould to present a statistical tale like no other.
Stay connected
Join us on Facebook and share your experiences with Andy’s texts, check out news, access free stuff, see photos, watch videos, learn about competitions, and much more.
Supplements
Instructor Resources (Log-in needed)
Editable PowerPoint Slides to allow you to easily integrate each chapter into your lessons
A Teaching Guide, containing advice on using the narrative and learning features in your teaching
A testbank of multiple choice questions and short exercises to test students' understanding of the material
Resource Pack to easily upload all the lecturer and student resources into your university’s online learning platform (i.e. Blackboard or Moodle), and customise the content to suit your teaching needs.
Student Resources (Free to access)
Multiple-Choice Questions to help you practice and prepare for assessments and exams.
Solutions to the end-of-chapter JIG:SAW Puzzles, to help you track your progress.
Datasets and R scripts from each chapter with hands-on exercises and problems that allow you to apply your knowledge and work through the Check your Brain problems and end-of-chapter puzzles in the text.
I like this textbook as well however I have chosen the other textbook "Discovering statistics using IBM SPSS statistics" also by Andy Field.
A bit of an experiment. Covers everything we need, contains good and helpful examples, other books were too boring. Explanations very clear and clever. Also: examples are broad enough in scope (not strictly psychological) to fit this course in our interdisciplinary programme.
We are intrigued by the story-line-approach. Not sure whether this will actually work and whether students will like it, but we decided to try for at least one year and see how it is received. Also: curious to see how well it works in a course (like ours) that will use many of the topics in a different order than how it is presented in the book.
This is a excellent text for students who are nervous around statistics. This is very readable text as a story and also provides the ability for staff to take content out of the book to teach in a more conventional style.
Andy Field's book is not only essential but more than highly recommended for all students (BA/MA/Phd) and researchers working with statistics. I keep the book for many many years, and always come back to it while running analyses and facing other adventures of statistics.
Excellent practical guide that is easily accessible to students in healthcare
Not aimed at appropriate level of students.
This book seems like it is aimed at a younger audience. Although I found it very useful in parts I wonder if our mature students will respond well to the cartoon layout. I will use sections of the text to inform my teaching of the topic.
A good informative book. However, to detailed in many ways for my students.
A good introduction to key concepts in a novel and engaging format.
This is a must-have book for any students doing their dissertation project using statistics and quantitative methods. The book is easy to follow and very comprehensive.
