Oh, I just realized that you asked how to explain it to students with little or no stat knowledge. That's a bit tougher; I think that students have to know what a sampling distribution is in order to understand se's, and I've found that sampling distributions are difficult for students to wrap their heads around witthout lots of hands-on examples. I suppose you could explain it in terms of the formula, and emphasize that the se is the standard deviation divided by the square root of the sample size. You can use that to explain that as variability decreases or sample size increases, the standard error gets smaller.
________________________________________ From: Annette Taylor [[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, May 06, 2010 11:29 AM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: [tips] standard deviation versus standard error I am trying to explain to students with no or minimal stats knowledge the difference between standard deviation and standard error. They get SD pretty well because I can talk about average deviation about a mean for a set of scores. SE, the more commonly accepted error term these days, is a bit more complicated. Anyone have an "easy" way to describe it to students? Annette Annette Kujawski Taylor, Ph. D. Professor, Psychological Sciences University of San Diego 5998 Alcala Park San Diego, CA 92110 [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13390.2bbc1cc8fd0e5f9e0b91f01828c87814&n=T&l=tips&o=2485 or send a blank email to leave-2485-13390.2bbc1cc8fd0e5f9e0b91f01828c87...@fsulist.frostburg.edu --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=2487 or send a blank email to leave-2487-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
