In praise of stats courses like Nancy Melucci's....
I'm about to join the set nomail void* for a couple of weeks, but before I go, a
word of praise for the short, simple and intensive summertime introduction to
statistics. My first encounter was of that sort -- not actually a stats course,
instead, the first 8 or so class-hours of a course in Psychological Testing which
(oddly?) didn't have statistics as a pre-requisite. I think that the course had
two things going for it: one was the immediately obvious homework-driven
relevance of the ideas, e.g., "Did George do better on the History exam than Mary
did on the Chemistry exam?" (Solution: compare z-scores.) The other was that
there was absolutely no opportunity for students to 'skip topics.' It might be
nice to prove the central limits theorem or to derive some working formula -- as
indeed I was asked to do in a later 'real' stats course, but the mathematically
disinclined, like me, will take a chance that "it won't be on the exam." (There
being much precident for half-a-loaf education in most psychology courses, I
think.) While 'roaming around' in the "real" statistical concepts course, I found
myself clinging to the rock luckily established for me in the summer course.
Going Nomail 'till August,
-David
*Review tips to [EMAIL PROTECTED] shows a much-reduced number of tiputally
active subscribers at the moment. -D.
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David G. Likely, Department of Psychology,
University of New Brunswick
Fredericton, N. B., E3B 5A3 Canada
History of Psychology:
http://www.unb.ca/psychology/likely/psyc4053.htm
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