This is awesome! Quick question -- I'm wondering how much of your lessons incorporated acknowledging the huge assumptions anyone who uses any kind of stats makes (and the fact that you can't just "check" if they're "true" or "false"). As a practicing statistician and social science researcher I find that it's common to take a very formulaic approach to stats -- just plug in numbers into formulas, accept and reject hypotheses, and you're done! -- which is psychologically pleasing but ultimately a bad approach. Perhaps another area to evolve stats education?
Thank you! It's a good question. I spent the last week of class trying to teach them how parametric and non-parametric tests work at a mathematical level, so I think we covered a lot of the assumptions implicitly, though we probably didn't cover them in the way that you mean. I do think taking a look under the hood is one way to fight the formulaic approach, but at the same time it's true that they didn't have any lessons explicitly about how to check assumptions. It's something that would be good to add in a longer or more advanced course!
This is awesome! Quick question -- I'm wondering how much of your lessons incorporated acknowledging the huge assumptions anyone who uses any kind of stats makes (and the fact that you can't just "check" if they're "true" or "false"). As a practicing statistician and social science researcher I find that it's common to take a very formulaic approach to stats -- just plug in numbers into formulas, accept and reject hypotheses, and you're done! -- which is psychologically pleasing but ultimately a bad approach. Perhaps another area to evolve stats education?
Thank you! It's a good question. I spent the last week of class trying to teach them how parametric and non-parametric tests work at a mathematical level, so I think we covered a lot of the assumptions implicitly, though we probably didn't cover them in the way that you mean. I do think taking a look under the hood is one way to fight the formulaic approach, but at the same time it's true that they didn't have any lessons explicitly about how to check assumptions. It's something that would be good to add in a longer or more advanced course!