Learning to interpret data in context is an important educational outcome. To assess students' attainment of this outcome, it is necessary to examine the interplay between their contextual and statistical reasoning. We describe a research method designed to do so. The method draws upon Toulmin's (1958, 2003) model of argumentation for the first…

When comparing social science phenomena through a time perspective, absolute and relative difference (RD) are the two typical presentation formats used to communicate interpretations to the audience, while time distance (TD) is the least frequently used of such formats. This article argues that the chosen presentation format is extremely important…

Use of multivariate analysis (e.g., multivariate analysis of variance) is common when normally distributed outcomes are collected in intervention research. However, when mixed responses--a set of normal and binary outcomes--are collected, standard multivariate analyses are no longer suitable. While mixed responses are often obtained in…

Two basic data sources required for research studies have been secondary and primary. Secondary data collection helps the researcher to provide relevant background to the study and are, in most cases, available for retrieval from recorded sources. Primary data collection requires the researcher to venture into the field where the study is to take…