Week 6

Short note: Time flies when you are having fun. I've had many of my first times in China: first time skiing, first time going to West Lake(the most famous lake in China) and etc. It seems unbelievable to me that I've already been in China for almost two months and only have less than one month left to spend in China.

For this past week, I've been reviewing basic knowledges of statistics and trying to find a statistical test that works the best for the survey that I'll be conducting soon. Here I'll give a short summary of what I've learned.

There are two major types of statistics: descriptive and inferential statistics. Descriptive statistics provides simple summaries, such as maximum and minimum, about the sample but could not be generalized beyond that. Inferential statistics, on the other hand, allows us to make inferences about the population beyond our data. Knowing that I will need to compare survey results from both Chinese and BASIS OV students and to make a generalization about a larger population, I plan on using the inferential statistics, two-sample t test, for my survey. A two-sample t test examines whether the results of my two independent groups, which are Chinese and BASIS OV students, are significantly different from one another.