The approach of SMEP-III is conceptual rather than mathematical. The authors stress the understanding, applications, and interpretation of concepts rather than derivation and proof or hand-computation.

This book is intended for use in the elementary statistics course in Educa tion or in Psychology. While it is primarily designed for use in the first semester of a two-semester course, it may also be used in a one-semester course. There are not five or ten competing texts; the number is much closer to fifty or a hundred. Why, then, should we write still another one? A new statistics text for use in Education and Psychology is, to some slight extent, comparable to a new translation or edition of the Bible. Most of it has been said before-but this time with a difference. The present writers realize that elementary statistics students know very little about the subject-even the meaning of I is all Greek to them. This text covers the basic course in depth, with examples using real data from the real world. It, of course, contains the usual reference tables and several new ones; it gives the appropriate formulas every time; and it accurately depicts all graphs. It is so comprehensive that if instructors can't find their own special areas of interest covered, then those interests probably don't belong in a basic text.

This book focuses on experimental research in two disciplines that have a lot of common ground in terms of theory, experimental designs used, and methods for the analysis of experimental research data: education and psychology. Although the methods covered in this book are also frequently used in many other disciplines, including sociology and medicine, the examples in this book come from contemporary research topics in education and psychology. Various statistical packages, commercial and zero-cost Open Source ones, are used. The goal of this book is neither to cover all possible statistical methods out there nor to focus on a particular statistical software package. There are many excellent statistics textbooks on the market that present both basic and advanced concepts at an introductory level and/or provide a very detailed overview of options in a particular statistical software programme. This is not yet another book in that genre. Core theme of this book is a heuristic called the question-design-analysis bridge: there is a bridge connecting research questions and hypotheses, experimental design and sampling procedures, and common statistical methods in that context. Each statistical method is discussed in a concrete context of a set of research question with directed (one-sided) or undirected (two-sided) hypotheses and an experimental setup in line with these questions and hypotheses. Therefore, the titles of the chapters in this book do not include any names of statistical methods such as ‘analysis of variance’ or ‘analysis of covariance’. In a total of seventeen chapters, this book covers a wide range of topics of research questions that call for experimental designs and statistical methods, fairly basic or more advanced.