This note documents my ongoing Tutorials in Applied Statistics with R (and RStudio), which are aimed at first-year undergraduate social scientists.

Three years ago, I published a Data Science with R course that has gone through a few iterations since then.

This year, I started teaching a short series of eight tutorials that cover more or less the same ground, although the audience is now first-year undergraduate (instead of postgraduate) students in political science.

The tutorials come with a lecture, taught by two colleagues (I teach two slightly different versions of the tutorials for each of them), which makes up time to focus on R + RStudio in class.

Teaching material

As usual, every bit of the course that I feel comfortable posting online has been published as a GitHub repository.

Some of the material repeats examples used in other courses (including a ‘failed’ course that I was forced to teach last year), but many if not most of the material is brand new.

I have also worked on three documents, which are linked to in the README file of the repository, and which are hosted on Google Docs:

• What to learn and to revise for the tutorials
• Survey research project instructions (if relevant)
• Troubleshooting

The second document, in particular, is very much connected to how the course is assessed in one of the versions of the course. The other version uses class exams, which I cannot publish beyond the ‘mock exam’ that is already online.

I might post the tutorial slides one day, if I manage to purge them from links that lead to student information, and can send the exercise solutions to whoever wants them.

Possible improvements

This is very much version ‘0.x’ of the tutorials. I might try to improve a few things in the future. If the course could change its name to something for specific to social scientists, I would also welcome that.

As I wrote somewhere in the README file, the ultimate goal of the tutorials is to cover more or less the same content as Matthew Blackwell does in his Data Analysis and Politics course at Harvard University.

This year will be my 13th year teaching R and RStudio. Time flies!