The course is designed to acquaint researchers (non-Breeders) with the principles of experimental design, basic experimental designs used in crop research, analysis of variance and regression and correlation analysis.  It also introduces the Statistical Tool for Agricultural Research (STAR), a user-friendly software that uses GUI created in Java and functions developed in R to assist crop scientists in the design and analysis of data. The course is intended for researchers in the Agricultural and Biological Sciences.  It employs a combination of lecture, group exercises, and hands-on exercises using STAR.

TRAINING OBJECTIVES

• Review basic statistical concepts
• Describe the three essential components of an experimental design and explain the importance of each component.
• Identify the advantages and disadvantages of using the different experimental designs.
• Generate randomization and electronic field book using STAR for basic experimental designs.
• Demonstrate how to import tab and comma delimited files into STAR.
• Demonstrate how to sort and reshape data files using STAR
• Construct analysis of variance table for basic experimental designs and perform the analysis using STAR.
• Perform partitioning of sums of squares and mean comparison.
• Determine the appropriate transformation for a given set of data.
• Present remedial measures in handling missing data
• Perform correlation and regression analysis.

COURSE CONTENT

• Basic Statistics
• Principles of experimental design
• Basic experimental designs
• Analysis of variance and Mean Comparison
• Partitioning Sums of Squares
• Data transformation
• Missing data
• Regression and Correlation

International Rice Research Institute
DAPO Box 7777, Metro Manila, Philippines
Fax: (63- 2) 891-1292; 580 5699
Phone: (63- 2) 845-0563; 580 5600 ext 2895
Email:  v.bartolome@irri.org