1. The beneficial effects of empowerment in learning statistics in Psychology

2. Statistics and Psychology Students

3. Psychology & Statistics
Central part of the discipline methodology

4. Psych Students & Statistics
Don’t mix.

5. 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

6. 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

7. BrawStats:

8. 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

9. 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?

10. 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

11. 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

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

13. BrawStats & Data Projects

14. BrawStats & Data Projects

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

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

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

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

19. 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.

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

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

22. 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

23. Conclusion: Empowerment works