Math Modeling and Statistics Applications

Students learn a great deal of math in high school, but they often don’t learn how the math is used to make decisions in fields like business, social science, and public policy. This course is designed to teach students how professionals in business, government, and social science use math to make decisions. During the first part of this course, students are taught the basics of statistics. This includes mean, variance, standard deviation, Z-scores, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing and p-values. The students are asked to analyze data from different fields and draw a conclusion. Does a government program decrease the poverty rate? Did a business’s ad campaign increase sales? Did a medication work better than a placebo? The second part of this course is math modeling. Students will be able to find the best fit equations that relate two or more quantities to each other. What should the price be of a product based on a multiple set of factors? What is the effect of poverty, and unemployment on the crime rate? A course like this is often taught to people who are getting degrees in business, public policy, economics, and social science. Thanks to online software, students can now quickly do the calculations and spend more time analyzing data, drawing conclusions - and making decisions.