Unless they work for Verizon, Deb. :)
Twice in recent years I have taken over the undergrad stats class of
a departed colleague who had the reputation of teaching at the 4th grade level.
It was in these two classes where the typical student could not decide whether
.043 is less than or more than .05 and where many students could not convert
feet into inches even when told how to do it. This semester I have a much
better group, most of whom knew what they were getting into when they
registered for my section.
Cheers,
Karl L. Wuensch
From: Deborah S. Briihl [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Saturday, September 29, 2012 9:32 AM
To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)
Subject: Re: [tips] Is p < .05 ?
Btw, you are not the only person with this problem. I cannot tell you the
number of students who just do not grasp this. What works best for us is to
have the students think about it as if it were money. Then they can get the
concept of which is greater.
Deb
Deborah Briihl
Dept of psych and counseling
Valdosta state university
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
,Sent from my iPad
On Sep 28, 2012, at 7:16 PM, "Wuensch, Karl L"
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 5:43 PM, Wuensch, Karl L
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I am not the greatest fan of NHST, but do my duty to teach it. For a good
while now I have been disturbed that a substantial proportion of my
undergraduate students never figure out how to decide whether or not a test is
significant. I tried stressing that p is a measure of the goodness of fit
between the data and the null, that p is like the strength of evidence in
support of the accused null defendant in statistical court, and so on. Nothing
seemed to help much.
Now one of my teaching assistants has discovered why. Given two
numbers, these students are unable to identify which is smaller. No, I am not
kidding. Yes, this involves numbers between 0 and 1. My TA spend half an hour
trying to teach them how to tell which is the smaller of two numbers, without
great success.
Karl W.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN9LZ3ojnxY
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