The course introduces students to various methods of data collection, presentation, analysis and interpretation of scientific data. Data collection methods include experiments, field surveys and direct observations. Concepts of statistics, importance and misuse of statistics, sampling and its importance sampling methods (simple, random, systematic and stratified sampling).

Various types of data presentation (bar graph, pie chart, histogram, line graph, polygons and tables) will be discussed. Other areas are scales of measurements (nominal, ordinal interval, ratio), measures of central tendency (mean, mode, median, stem-and-leaf and box plots) and methods of dispersion range, quartiles, inter-quartiles, percentages, standard deviation, standard error, coefficient of variation).