Data Literacy

Statistics is a branch of mathematics. It consists of tools and techniques that help describe, organize and interpret information or data.* There are a couple of ways to do this:

Descriptive Statistics summarizes or describes data characteristics in a meaningful way. In general, there are two ways in which this data is usually described: Measures of central tendency (e.g. mode, median, mean) or Measures of spread (e.g. range, quartiles, standard deviation)

Inferential Statistics draws conclustions (predictions) from population samples to make generalizations about the entire population

The Oregon Tech Libraries offer several books that can help you with statistics. Many of these books employ various tooks to help them in analyzing data such as R, Python, SPSS, and Tableau. However, the general principles will be the same for any tool you use.