Information Literacy

  I am not a math person. I will gladly admit with no shame that math and science were never my forte and that my strong suits are English and history. Let’s be honest, I chose a trade school in NYC that had no math requirement because I hated it so much. However, to graduate with my degree, I had to take a math class, so to set myself up for success, I chose Statistics in MAT-152 and took the course in the Spring of 2021. I was working full time in corporate America (still am) and trying to juggle three online courses so why try to make it harder with calculus, right? Going into Statistics, especially in an online environment, I was very nervous and did not have much confidence in passing the course. However, and call me crazy, I actually left the course feeling more confident than when I walked in! How is that so, you might ask? Statcrunch...and research, and reading the textbook but mainly statcrunch. I never understood math, so coming into statistics and seeing a program store all my equations, show how these equations and answers could be formulated in tables and documents at my fingertips and provide me with real answers to life problems had me sold. 

    

     One of my goals for information literacy was to be able to evaluate sources and discern which sources are credible to use in research. While there was not a great deal of research done from an assignment perspective or paper in statistics, I had to learn to discern and how to evaluate sources on understanding harder concepts in statistics. In the artifact, there is a great deal of my work in stat crunch that shows my work and process for the Chapter 7 lab where I focused heavily on confidence intervals with sample proportions. Confidence intervals for sample proportions are found differently than for population proportions so I had to do extra research to wrap my non-math wired brain around the two differences. While there are great resources, I had to learn to discern what databases to use to understand what the true differences are and what they tell us. This allowed me to confidently go into my lab and use the correct numbers for variance, and standard deviation to find the correct proportion of success. I found rinky dink calculators online that were never accurate or websites that had unclear methods of explanation so I learned to discern pretty quickly what websites would give me accurate and scholarly methods to achieve the result I was looking for. I accomplished this goal as I kept a running list of credible sites to use and received great feedback on reports for my work and showing how I got to my answers. 

  

    Another goal I set for myself was to be able to use statistical information that I have developed and graphed, evaluate it, and then use it to back up a hypothesis or answer showing the methodology of how I got there. I accomplished this in the course as I purposefully made separate documents outlining my statcrunch tables, graphs and work and saved them, even when it was not asked to attach it in the assignment. The reasoning behind my madness is that I wanted to be able to look back on my work when reviewing problems and scenarios and clearly see how I got from point A to B, instead of spinning my wheels trying to remember how I got there and confusing myself. This also allowed me the opportunity to find the point of where I went wrong, if I got an answer incorrect. The statcrunch work showcased in my Chapter 7 lab allowed me to write my success statements defending my hypothesis statement or showing that the hypothesis statement was not supported. By utilizing this tool and other resources, I confidently can say I like math, and left with a new understanding and appreciation for statistics!