Learning Objectives

  • Explain the difference between empirical and theoretical distributions.
  • Define population, sample, and sampling distributions and identify each as either empirical or theoretical.
  • Explain the difference between statistics and parameters.
  • Define sampling error and explain how it affects efforts to generalize from a sample to a population.
  • Define the central limit theorem.
  • Describe the z and t distributions, including whether these are empirical or theoretical distributions and which one is appropriate depending on sample size.