James S. MacDonall wrote:
"My department is considering revamping our current underegraduate
statistics course. ........ We are considering going to an SPSS based,
non-computational approach."
Without commenting on the content I'd like to raise my voice to object to a
non-computational, SPSS-based course. We all know that unless you use these
programs regularly, you have to re-learn them every time you need them. And
the fact is that few of our students will bee using SPSS enough to justify
spending a lot of time teaching it to them. My argument is that satatistics
is first and foremost a course in logic and that students to need to get
their hands dirty with computations to fully understand the logic. This may
not be logically true but I have found it to be empirically true.
My thoughts were shaped by my 2 years as a post doc in a Bio dept. where I
became the ersatz statistician because their idea of a stat course for grad
students was "tell 'em about measures of central tendency and variance and
then show them how to use SPSS." I had opne Hell of a time trying to
explain to a poor, beleaguered grad student why I couldn't show him how to
do an ANOVA when one of his groups only had an N=1 in it...... i.e., that
you can't analyze variance without variance!!!
Of course in theory, the noncomputational approach might work but in
practice you need too much time to show students the minutiae of SPSS and it
necessarily takes away from the time need to actually explkain what
statistics is all about. If you want "non-computational" it might be more
useful to show them how to use an Excel spreadsheet. They can then ad rows,
square numbers, etc. without physically adding up columns. THey come awayt
from it with knowledge of a useful program (i.e., Excel) and you still have
time to lecture on statistics.
Just my 2 cents worth.
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Edward I. Pollak, Ph.D. Office (610)436-2945
Professor of Psychology Home (610)363-1939
West Chester University FAX (610)436-2846
West Chester, PA 19383 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.wcupa.edu
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Husband, father, biopsychologist, herpetoculturist and bluegrass
fiddler........... not necessarily in order of importance.
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