Last time, I gave a bit about the requirements of a game to match the most synonyms in one minute, and how what I learned using SAS was a basis for several parts of the game. This activity is going into Making Camp Premium, which will be a paid version of our best-selling game, Making…
I’m going to be speaking at SAS Global Forum about the places you can go starting your career with SAS, for example … If you know anything about SAS, you might think from the title that I used my mad data analysis skills to figure out what works and what doesn’t for games. While that…
Where we left off, the reliability was unacceptably low for our measure to assess students knowledge of multiplication, division and other third and fourth grade math standards. We were sad. One person, whose picture I have replaced with the mother from our game, Spirit Lake, so she can remain anonymous, said to me: But there…
I hate the concept of those books with titles like “something or other for dummies” or “idiot’s guide to whatever” because of the implication that if you don’t know microbiology or how to create a bonsai tree of take out your own appendix you must be a moron. I once had a student ask me…
Occasionally, when I am teaching about a topic like repeated measures Analysis of Variance, a brave student will raise a hand and ask, Seriously, professor, WHEN will I ever use this? The aspiring director of a library, clinic, afterschool program, etc. does not see how statistics apply to conducting an outreach campaign or HIV screening…
A picture says 1,000 words – especially if you are talking to a non-technical audience. Take the example below. We wanted to know whether the students who played our game Fish Lake at least through the first math problem and the students who gave up at the first sight of math differed in achievement. Maybe…
If I were to give one piece of advice to a would-be program evaluator, it would be to get to know your data so intimately it’s almost immoral. Generally, program evaluation is an activity undertaken by someone with a degree of expertise in research methods and statistics (hopefully!) using data gathered and entered by people’s…
At the Western Users of SAS Software conference (yes, they DO know that is WUSS), I’ll be speaking about using SAS for evaluation. “If the results bear any relationship at all to reality, it is indeed a fortunate coincidence.” I first read that in a review of research on expectancy effects, but I think it…
It’s almost 6 am here on the east coast, and after flying all day during which I worked on a final report for a grant to develop our latest educational game and make bug fixes on same, I landed and wrote a report for a client, because that pays the bills. In the meantime, over on…
Who was it that said asking a statistician about sample size is like asking a jeweler about price. If you have to ask, you can’t afford it. We all know that the validity of a chi-square test is questionable if the expected sample size of the cells is less than five. Well, what do you…