Today I’m on day two of the 20-day blogging challenge, the brain child of Kelly Hines and a great way to find new, interesting bloggers. The second day prompt was to share an organizational tip from your classroom, one thing that works for you. The latest tool I’ve been using is livebinders . Remember when…
I came across this really interesting post on the 20-Day Blogging Challenge for teachers. I’m not sure how likely I am to be able to finish it in January since it is already the sixth and January is a really busy month for me, but we will see. The first prompt is “Tell about a…
Sometimes people talk about path analysis models, confirmatory factor analysis and/or exploratory factor analysis as separate and distinct techniques from structural equation modeling (SEM). That is rather like talking about Dogo Argentinos as different from dogs when in fact they are a TYPE of dog (picture of dogo attached for those wondering). Similarly, path analysis…
I don’t use AMOS for structural equation modeling all that often and every time I do I have to look up all of the steps again. 1. Install SPSS and AMOS. Fortunately, it seems to work on Windows 8. Yay! You can either open AMOS by double-clicking on it or you can open it directly…
One of the problems many students have when first learning statistics is deciding when to reject the null hypothesis. Z is small and low probability means it is not likely to occur so you reject, right? (Wrong!). P > .86 and when you have a large z-score you reject the null hypothesis, so with p…
I was reading the powerpoints that came with a textbook, you know, in the instructor’s packet, and I was already thinking this book was a little more focused on computation over comprehension for my liking when I came to the following learning objective: “Compute an Analysis of Variance by hand.” Are you fucking kidding me?…
It’s that time of year again when we hear complaints about how terrible the U.S. is doing in math. This article by The Atlantic with the title American Schools vs. the World: Expensive, Unequal, Bad at Math is just one of many, many reports that showed up in my twitter stream. The first question anyone…
This month, I’m teaching biostatistics for National University, and so far I am really enjoying it. There is just a really minor problem, though. While I received a copy of the textbook, I did not receive a copy of the instructor’s manual with answers to the homework problems. Since I am going to grade 20…
I’m looking forward to teaching my first masters level course in a lo-o-ng time next week. Since this may be the first course students take in their masters program, the question I’m faced with is, “What would you tell someone at the very beginning of learning about statistics?” I’m starting with this: Bias = bad…
Why do we still teach systematic random sampling as an option? As you may recall from your Statistics 101, simple random sampling is when you select from the sample at random. So, if you want 100 people out of a sample of 10,000 in a dataset, you would pull a random sample by, most likely,…