Re: Question about stats in intro texts

[David Campbell]

In fact, I usually use words similar to what you provided below, Karl.  But this level of precision is lost on the students.  I can only hope that they retain a general understanding that there are two ways to explain the findings and we need to rule out the chance explanation (by finding it an unlikely fit for the data).  Too much reference to concepts like sampling distribution, standard error, and null hypothesis--and you can be assured that the first-year (just out of high school) undergraduates would be totally confused. --Dave Karl L. Wuensch wrote: I tell them that in intro statistics, they will learn ways to calculate the likelihood that the chance explanation is correct (and if it turns out to be quite unlikely, say <p.05, then we scrap the chance explanation and announce our findings).   Really, at Humboldt the Psyc students learn Bayesian inference?  Might you really mean the likelihood of getting data as unsual as these (due to sampling error) were the null true?   Most folks stick to the traditional p that is used by almost all psych researchers, that is, P(data | H0), the probability of getting data as unusual as those obtained assuming the null is true, not P(H0 | data), the probability that the null is true given the data.   ----- Original Message ----- From: David Campbell To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences Sent: Saturday, June 26, 2004 4:23 PM Subject: Re: Question about stats in intro texts --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- --  ___________________________________________________________________ David E. Campbell, Ph.D.        [EMAIL PROTECTED] Department of Psychology        Phone: 707-826-3721 Humboldt State University       FAX:   707-826-4993 Arcata, CA  95521-8299          www.humboldt.edu/~campbell/psyc.htm --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]