Advantages and Disadvantages of Professional and Free Software for Teaching Statistics

Liga Paura, Irina Arhipova

Abstract


Teaching statistics leads to the problem of choosing software and appropriate solutions for necessary statistical course content. Although Excel is a common tool used in the statistical analysis, it is not in general a statistical tool. There are professional commercial statistical packages, such as SPSS and SAS, but they are expensive and therefore are not provided for undergraduate students or individual users. As an alternative way for the data analysis is to use free software. One of the most frequently used software in scientific research is dynamic open- source software and environment R.

Keywords:
Statistical methods; statistical software; SPSS; R software

Full Text:

 PDF

References


I. Rudusa and L. Berzina, Statistical software for statistics teaching and data analyzing: Improving the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics and Informatics, January 23-25, 2012, Kaunas, Lithuania. Kaunas: Aleksandro Stulginskio universitetas, 2012, pp. 24-26.

L. Paura and L. Berziņa, The Biometrics course content in agricultural study program: Improving the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics and Informatics, January 23-25, 2012, Kaunas, Lithuania. Kaunas: Aleksandro Stulginskio universitetas, 2012, pp. 18-20.

I. Fellows, Deducer: A Data Analysis GUI for R, Journal of statistical Software, vol. 49, issue 8, June 2012. [Online]. Available: http://www.jstatsoft.org/, [Accessed July 6, 2012].

M. Hervé GrapheR: a Multiplatform GUI for Drawing Customizable Graphs in R, The R Journal, vol. 3/2, December 2011. [Online]. Available: http://journal.r-project.org/, [Accessed July 6, 2012].

Ms. Xiaoping Zhu and Dr. Ognjen Kuljaca, A Short Preview of Free Statistical Software Packages for Teaching Statistics to Industrial Technology Majors, Journal of Industrial technology, vol. 21, no. 2, April-June 2005. [Online]. Available: ATMAE, http://atmae.org/, [Accessed July 6, 2012].

P. M. Valero-Mora and R. Ledesma, Graphical User Interfaces for R, Journal of statistical Software, vol. 49, issue 1, June 2012. [Online]. Available: http://www.jstatsoft.org/, [Accessed July 6, 2012].

M. Hervé. GrapheR: A multiplatform GUI for drawing customizable graphs in R. R package version 1.9-66. [Online]. Available: http://cran.r- project.org /package=GrapheR, [Accessed July 6, 2012].

SPSS software. Predictive analytics software and solutions. [Online]. Available: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/analytics/spss/, [Accessed July 6, 2012].

The R Project for Statistical Computing. [Online]. Available: http://www.R-project.org/, [Accessed July 6, 2012].

Welcome to R Studio,” [Online]. Available: http://rstudio.org/, [Accessed July 6, 2012].


Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2012 Liga Paura, Irina Arhipova

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.