Did you ever fill out one of those online forms where you kept trying to submit it and got messages like, “You need to enter your phone number in the format 311-234-12234” or You cannot have any special characters in this field. That one really irritates me because, in fact, my last name has a…
On twitter, there were a few comments from people who said they didn’t like to take interns because “More than doing work, they want to watch me work.” I see both sides of that. You’re busy. You’re not netflix. I get it. On the other hand, that’s a good way to learn. The data are…
Even though Rick Wicklin (buzzkill!) disabused me of the concern that SAS was communicating with aliens through the obscure coding in its sashelp data sets, I still wanted to roll my own. If you, too, feel more comfortable with a data set you have produced yourself, let me give you a few tips. There is…
I was going to write about prevalence and incidence, and how so-called simple statistics can be much more important than people think and are vastly under-rated. It was going to be cool. Trust me. In the process, I ran across two things even more important or cooler (I know, hard to believe, right?) Here’s what…
Over the weekend, I wrote a post showing how SAS can be used to make what appears to be a complex problem quite simple. First of all, am I just being dramatic? Seriously, how can having your variable lengths differ be a disaster? Simple. You are merging by a variable that is a unique user…
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…
Do you really need to document everything? Those who say that there is no such thing as a stupid question might be reconsidering their position right about now. Of course we need to document everything! Perhaps my reluctance stems from my hatred of technical writers. If you are a tech writer and are a decent…
In assessing whether our Fish Lake game really works to teach fractions, we collect a lot of data, including a pretest and a post-test. We also use a lot of types of items, including a couple of essay questions. Being reasonable people, we are interested in the extent to which the ratings on these items…
Sometimes, you can just eyeball it. Really, if something truly is an outlier, you ought to be able to spot it. Take this plot, for example. It should be pretty obvious that the vast majority of our sample for the Fish Lake game were students in grades, 4, 5 and 6. Those in the lower…