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:dbri...@valdosta.edu] 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 dbri...@valdosta.edu<mailto:dbri...@valdosta.edu> ,Sent from my iPad On Sep 28, 2012, at 7:16 PM, "Wuensch, Karl L" <wuens...@ecu.edu<mailto:wuens...@ecu.edu>> wrote: On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 5:43 PM, Wuensch, Karl L <wuens...@ecu.edu<mailto:wuens...@ecu.edu>> 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 --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: wuens...@ecu.edu<mailto:wuens...@ecu.edu>. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13060.c78b93d4d09ef6235e9d494b3534420e&n=T&l=tips&o=20788 (It may be necessary to cut and paste the above URL if the line is broken) or send a blank email to leave-20788-13060.c78b93d4d09ef6235e9d494b35344...@fsulist.frostburg.edu<mailto:leave-20788-13060.c78b93d4d09ef6235e9d494b35344...@fsulist.frostburg.edu> --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@jab.org. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=20789 or send a blank email to leave-20789-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu