"Donald Burrill" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
[EMAIL PROTECTED]">news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> On Fri, 25 Aug 2000, William Levine wrote:
>
> > I am teaching an Introduction to Statistics course in psychology, and
> > in class the other day, I brought up the issue that SAT scores and IQ
> > scores may not really be interval scales.
>
> Mmm. Well, Bill, if they aren't "really" interval scales, what do you
> suppose them to be, "really", especially given the amount of time and
> energy that have been devoted to trying to ensure that they are interval?
> And, what difference does it make, practically, to the work assigned in
> the course, and/or to the psychological and quantitative theory & practice
> that your students will eventually be expected to understand, if not
> indeed to have mastered?
I completely agree. If the results of work done on those scales should be
doubted, should we trust anything done in the field of psychometrics ? (not
a rhetorical question)
(snip)
> > Without raising the specter of what IQ and SAT tests really measure,
> > does anyone have any comments that might be helpful in telling students
> > what to think about this?
>
> Can't imagine what you were about in introducing the matter in the first
> place. If your introductory students are anything like the ones I've
> dealt with over the years, they have quite enough to do in learning to
> make sense out of statistics as a discipline, without being distracted
> by issues that are not unanimously agreed (a) among psychologists and
> (b) among statisticians.
Could not agree more. Having tried myself to introduce this very complex
issue in an intro course, I feel that the question raised more skepticism in
the students than I would have liked. They had a tendency to discard the
theory of biometrics afterwards. Not to mention that the discussion which
was supposed to last only a few minutes continued for two hours...
Julie
> -- Don.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Donald F. Burrill [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 348 Hyde Hall, Plymouth State College, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> MSC #29, Plymouth, NH 03264 603-535-2597
> 184 Nashua Road, Bedford, NH 03110 603-471-7128
>
>
>
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