The beneficial effects of empowerment in learning statistics in Psychology

Statistics and Psychology Students

Psychology & Statistics Central part of the discipline methodology

Psych Students & Statistics Don’t mix.

The Issue: Disempowerment Language barrier: psychology students don’t fluently read mathematical notation Learned as ritual: procedures to follow and formulae to learn without understanding link between what they do what they achieve Highly error prone: small mistakes can lead to wildly wrong outcomes and are difficult to avoid or to subsequently find

The Approach: Empowerment Principles: put students in control of their learning but do not downgrade content material Focus: research design & statistics as integrated whole system statistics and design are seen as tuning the system for optimal performance

BrawStats:

BrawStats & Empowerment 1 Remove disempowerment: Language: use graphical language Understanding: ask for explanations Errors: not possible In some ways, this is like a statistics playground we give students discovery projects

BrawStats & Discovery Projects Example discovery projects: what is the difference in outcome between random sampling and opportunity sampling? how does outcome depend on sample size? is there a cost in using a Categorical IV with 3 cases?

BrawStats & Discovery Projects Discovery projects allow students to learn: statistics is easy statistics makes sense you don’t need to know the answer you can figure it out for yourself

BrawStats & Empowerment 2 Use statistics for something personally relevant map student experience through the term Data collected week by week class data released (anon) to students regularly import into BrawStats they use it to see how stats tells the story of the term

BrawStats & Data Projects This panel allows easy selection of variables (2 or 3) Pressing apply causes the selection to be transferred throughout BrawStats.

BrawStats & Data Projects

BrawStats & Data Projects

BrawStats & Data Projects Data projects allow students to focus on the psychology, not the statistics statistics visualizes psychology

The Results: Empowerment Self-report: confidence tracked through term Behaviour: BrawStats usage tracked through term Raw Ability: doing data analysis

Results: self-report Reported stress levels for weeks 1-10 of term (6 is Reading Week) The starting difference is as expected.

Results: behaviour No of unique users of BrawStats per week during term time. Class size is 175

Results: behaviour Number of times each user started BrawStats as a function of week of term. For the middle part of the term, users are doing a lot of free-time work.

Raw Ability Analysis of 8 unseen data sets: provide scenario analyse data identify data anomalies skew outliers non-independence do power analysis

Raw Ability Time per data set: this is fast, especially since it is sustained over 8 data sets.

Results: Self-report: Behaviour: Raw ability: striking pattern of reducing stress Behaviour: high levels of software usage Raw ability: competent beyond basic needs fluent and fast

Conclusion: Empowerment works