I wouldn’t normally consider Excel for analysis, but there are four reasons I’ll be using it sometimes for the next class I’m teaching. First of all, we start out with some pretty basic statistics, I’m not even sure I’d call them statistics, and Excel is good for that kind of stuff. Second, Excel now has…
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…
Last post I wrote a little about local norms versus national norms and gave the example of how the best-performing student in the area can still be below grade level. Today, I want to talk a little about tests. As I mentioned previously, when we conducted the pretest prior to student playing our game, Spirit…
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…
I will be the first to admit that I’m not the warm fuzzy type. Maybe you’re like me, you’d like to do good for your community but you just can’t see yourself as a physician. Maybe your bedside manner is to snap at someone to quit being a whiner. Or maybe you really are a…
To be honest, when I first began studying statistics social justice never entered the equation. Like most people in America, I think, I was concerned about problems like crime, poverty, low educational attainment of minority groups. Like most people, my concern didn’t translate into much actual effort on my part. No, I took my first…
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…
Occasionally, a brave student will ask me, When will I ever use this? The “this” can be anything from a mixed model analysis to nested arrays. (I have answers for both of those, by the way.) I NEVER get that question when discussing topics like filtering data, whether for records or variables, because it is…
In the last post, I used SAS Enterprise Guide to filter out a couple of ‘bad’ records that came from test data, then I created a summary table of the number of questions answered and the percentage correct. Then, I calculated the mean percentage correct for the around 84%. That seemed a bit high to me….