Common sense is a dynamic concept and it is natural that our (statistical) common sense lags behind the development of statistical science. What is not so easy to understand is why common sense lags behind as much as it does. We conduct a survey among Japanese students and provide examples and tentative explanations of a number of statistical…

Drasgow, Levine, and Zickar (1996) suggested a statistic based on the Neyman-Pearson lemma (e.g., Lehmann & Romano, 2005, p. 60) for detecting preknowledge on a known set of items. The statistic is a special case of the optimal appropriateness indices of Levine and Drasgow (1988) and is the most powerful statistic for detecting item…

Students studying statistics often misunderstand what statistics represent. Some of the most well-known misunderstandings of statistics revolve around null hypothesis significance testing. One pervasive misunderstanding is that the calculated p-value represents the probability that the null hypothesis is true, and that if p < 0.05, there is…

This article describes four semesters of introductory statistics courses that incorporate service learning and gardening into the curriculum with applications of the binomial distribution, least squares regression and hypothesis testing. The activities span multiple semesters and are iterative in nature.

The role of statistics is wide and crucial in daily life, making statistics important. Many students have difficulty understanding statistics. This study aims to determine students' statistical reasoning about inference statistics, which is limited to the subject matter of the testing hypotheses about two-sample hypotheses testing. This study used…

Here, students determine the total protein content in whey protein samples using the Lowry assay. Quantitative analysis was carried out using absorbance measured at 750 nm (standard method) and 96-well-plate digital images obtained using smartphones (proposed method). The proposed method was carried out using two smartphones (1 and 2). Smartphone…

Past research suggests revised parallel analysis (R-PA) tends to yield relatively accurate results in determining the number of factors in exploratory factor analysis. R-PA can be interpreted as a series of hypothesis tests. At each step in the series, a null hypothesis is tested that an additional factor accounts for zero common variance among…

This dissertation asks how to improve science education and science communication, and suggests that digital storytelling techniques can be used to better engage learners in the process of knowledge making. Digital storytelling refers to both the use of high-quality digital media content as learning materials, and also to the use of social…

When undertaking quantitative hypothesis testing, social researchers need to decide whether the data with which they are working is suitable for parametric analyses to be used. When considering the relevant assumptions they can examine graphs and summary statistics but the decision making process is subjective and must also take into account the…

In recent years, there have been calls for researchers to report and interpret confidence intervals (CIs) rather than relying solely on p-values. Such reforms, however, may be hindered by a general lack of understanding of CIs and how to interpret them. In this study, we assessed conceptual knowledge of CIs in undergraduate and graduate psychology…

In recent years, there have been calls for researchers to report and interpret confidence intervals (CIs) rather than relying solely on p-values. Such reforms, however, may be hindered by a general lack of understanding of CIs and how to interpret them. In this study, we assessed conceptual knowledge of CIs in undergraduate and graduate psychology…

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…

Children acquiring languages with noun classes (grammatical gender) have ample statistical information available that characterizes the distribution of nouns into these classes, but their use of this information to classify novel nouns differs from the predictions made by an optimal Bayesian classifier. We use rational analysis to investigate the…

Hypothesis testing involves a complex stepwise procedure that is challenging for many students in introductory university statistics courses. In this paper we assess how feedback from an Intelligent Tutoring System can address the logic of hypothesis testing and whether such feedback contributes to first-year social sciences students' proficiency…

This article illustrates ways that dynamic software using some sophisticated techniques in Excel can be used to demonstrate fundamental ideas related to hypothesis testing to increase student understanding of the concepts and methods in elementary statistics courses. The article considers hypothesis tests for the population mean with large or…