Software Reviews : Genstat: A Student Data Generation System Reviewed by Staff Publisher: Socware,Inc.,1789 Colby Street,Brockport,NY 14420;716-352-1986 (telephone: [phone]) Year of Publication: 1988 Version Reviewed: 1.45 Materials: 59-page manual in 3-ring binder;program disk Availability: MS-DOS computers Requirements: 256K RAM,i drive Effectiveness: Good User-Friendliness: Excellent Documentation: Good

Abstract

Genstat allows instructors to create individualized datasets for each student in a research methods class. It also produces answers to statistical problems for each dataset. The data generated may be discrete or continuous. The instructor can control the size, mean, variance, and skew of the datasets. Problems can be generated dealing with measures of central tendency and variance, cross-tabulations, correlations, regression, and ANOVA. This is an otherwise excellent instructional tool, but it is limited by supporting datasets of only six variables or fewer. Since only a single pair of variables may be jointly distributed in any set, Genstat is not intended for instruction on multivariate analysis.