When I first taught multivariate statistics, I was nervous. The material is more difficult than Statistics 101 so I assumed teaching the course would be more difficult as well. Over 25 years of teaching, I’ve found the opposite. The more advanced you get in a field, the easier the courses are to teach. You might…
Years ago, a friend of mine was in college and had an old, beat up car that leaked oil on to the street where it was parked, which, for some reason annoyed her elderly neighbor. When we returned from a trip overseas competing for the U.S., there was a notice on her car – the…
The results are in! The chart below gladdens my little heart, somewhat. One thing to note is the fact that the 95% confidence interval is comfortably above zero. Another point is that it looks like a pretty normal distribution. What is it? It is the difference between pretest and post-test scores for 71 students at…
Some problems that seem really complex are quite simple when you look at them in the right way. Take this one, for example: My hypothesis is that a major problem in math achievement is persistence. Students just give up at the first sign of trouble. I have three different data sets with student data from the Spirit…
Many years ago, I was walking through the exhibits at the county fair with my late husband (he was alive then, that’s why he was able to walk with me) and I lamented, Look at those quilts. My grandmother makes quilts. Look at those crocheted tablecloths. My other grandmother crochets. Look at me – what do…
Just finished the second week of the Boom Startup Ed Tech accelerator, which is GREAT. I am learning a lot and plan on working insane hours for the next few months to put it all into practice. We have had to answer a lot of legitimately hard questions about cash flow analysis, burn rate, user…
Previously, I discussed PROC FREQ for checking the validity of your data. Now we are on to data analysis, but, as anyone who does analysis for more than about 23 minutes can tell you, cleaning your data and doing analysis is seldom a two-step process. In fact, it’s more like a loop of two steps,…
I’m the world’s biggest hypocrite when it comes to documentation. In every staff meeting, I emphasize documenting whatever code you have written that week, but I always put off doing it myself. My excuse is always that it isn’t final and when I get the complete project done I will put it in the wiki….
I tell clients on our statistical consulting side all of the time that if your conclusion is only valid if you look at this specific subset of your sample, with this particular statistical technique. You need to look for a convergence or results. Does the mean score increase? Does the proportion of people passing a…
Is that enough acronyms for you? I’ll be speaking at Celebrating Equity: Women in STEM at ELAC. STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics ELAC – East Los Angeles College It’s 12:15 – 1:15 pm and it is free. There are six panelists (including me). Download Women in STEM Poster I presented last year and…