BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Illinois Wesleyan University Associate Professor of Economics Robert Leekley had a problem. As an instructor of introductory statistics for economics for more than 30 years, the longer Leekley taught, the more disillusioned he became with textbooks available for his course.
“I felt textbooks in this field were headed in the wrong direction,” said Leekley from his office in the Center for Liberal Arts on campus. “They were increasingly written so that instructors could pick and choose topics in any order they pleased. That might seem desirable, but then students lose any sense of continuity.”
To remedy that fault, Leekley created his own textbook years ago to use in class. This month, his insights are available to a larger audience. Leekley has published his work as a new textbook titled Applied Statistics for Business and Economics (CRC Press, 2010).
“Statistics is really just a few key ideas applied differently to different data,” Leekley said. “My goal for the textbook was to bring out the connections.”