Controlling Type 1 error and encouraging reproducible research are important in clinical and translational research. These concepts are frequently discussed in lectures with mathematical language, analytic examples, and probability distributions that demonstrate the issues. However, first-time learners in biostatistics courses focusing on…

Two novel proofs show that the sum of a specific pair of normal random variables is not normal are established in this note. This is one of the most often misunderstood facts by first-year students in probability theory and statistics. The first proof is concise using the moment generating function. The second proof checks whether the moments of…

Do children think of genetic inheritance as deterministic or probabilistic? In two novel tasks, children viewed the eye colors of animal parents and judged and selected possible phenotypes of offspring. Across three studies (N = 353, 162 girls, 172 boys, 2 non-binary; 17 did not report gender) with predominantly White U.S. participants collected…

Suppose "X" and "Y" are binary exposure and outcome variables, and we have full knowledge of the distribution of "Y," given application of "X." We are interested in assessing whether an outcome in some case is due to the exposure. This "probability of causation" is of interest in comparative…

Binary logistic regression is one of the most widely used statistical tools. The method uses odds, log odds, and odds ratios, which are difficult to understand and interpret. Understanding of logistic regression tends to fall down in one of three ways: (1) Many students and researchers come to believe that an odds ratio translates directly into…

This study investigated 3- to 5-year-olds' (N = 64, 37 girls, 62.5% White, data collected between 2021-2022) ability to use probabilistic information gleaned through active search to appropriately change or maintain expectations. In an online fishing game, children first learned that one of two ponds was good for catching fish. During a subsequent…

Recent years have seen the development of many novel scoring tools for disease prognosis and prediction. To become accepted for use in clinical applications, these tools have to be validated on external data. In practice, validation is often hampered by logistical issues, resulting in multiple small-sized validation studies. It is therefore…

Diabetes mellitus is a challenging chronic health condition at the forefront of attention of the healthcare system. Important estimates quantifying how diabetes prevalence varies by age are available for the general population, but these estimates are poorly characterized among autistic adults. Improved diabetes prevalence and likelihood estimates…

This article presents two ways of quantifying confounding using logistic response models for binary outcomes. Drawing on the distinction between marginal and conditional odds ratios in statistics, we define two corresponding measures of confounding (marginal and conditional) that can be recovered from a simple standardization approach. We…

There is growing consensus that selection history strongly guides spatial attention and is distinct from current goals and physical salience. Here, we focused on target-location probability cueing: when the target is more likely to appear in one region, search performance gradually improves for targets appearing in that region. Probability cueing…

In any visual search task in the lab or in the world, observers will make errors. Those errors can be categorized as "deterministic": If you miss this target in this display once, you will definitely miss it again. Alternatively, errors can be "stochastic", occurring randomly with some probability from trial to trial.…

Estimating confidence intervals (CIs) for the correlation has been a challenge because the correlation sampling distribution changes depending on the correlation magnitude. The Fisher z-transformation was one of the first attempts at estimating correlation CIs but has historically shown to not have acceptable coverage probability if data were…

Several researchers have called for schools to interpret universal screening results using posterior probabilities. Following this recommendation could require schools to move away from direct-route, single-measure screening unless base rates of risk fall within a narrow range. In this descriptive study, we investigated two questions surrounding…

Online collaborative discussion (OCD) focuses on promoting individual knowledge inquiry and group knowledge construction through active peer interactions and communications. In practice, it is necessary to explore how different modes of OCD come into play, in which student engagement can function as an evaluating indicator. To identify student…

The nonequivalent groups with anchor test (NEAT) design is widely used in test equating. Under this design, two groups of examinees are administered different test forms with each test form containing a subset of common items. Because test takers from different groups are assigned only one test form, missing score data emerge by design rendering…