When a psychologist announces a new research finding, it is often based on a rejected null hypothesis. However, if that hypothesis is true, the claim is a false alarm. Many students mistakenly believe that the probability of committing a false alarm equals alpha, the criterion for statistical significance, which is typically set at 5%. Instructors…

While interest in Bayesian statistics has been growing in statistics education, the treatment of the topic is still inadequate in both textbooks and the classroom. Because so many fields of study lead to careers that involve a decision-making process requiring an understanding of Bayesian methods, it is becoming increasingly clear that Bayesian…

We present a multiple-choice test, the Montana State University Formal Reasoning Test (FORT), to assess college students' scientific reasoning ability. The test defines scientific reasoning to be equivalent to formal operational reasoning. It contains 20 questions divided evenly among five types of problems: control of variables, hypothesis…

Social responsibility has been linked to the moral development of students, but little prior research has examined how personal and situational variables influence students' willingness to show care and concern for social issues that reflect higher levels of moral development. We theorised and tested the hypotheses that females would endorse…

This article uses data survey on 82 teachers from the University of Ouagadougou and the model of unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) to assess the determinants of acceptance and educational use of ICT by teachers. The paper's outcomes show that the construct "performance expectancy" of ICT (expected utility and…

Results from a study of 16 community college students are presented. The research question concerned how students reasoned about p-values. Students' approach to p-values in hypothesis testing was procedural. Students viewed p-values as something that one compares to alpha values in order to arrive at an answer and did not attach much meaning to…

According to distractor-based response retrieval (Frings, Rothermund, & Wentura, 2007), irrelevant information will be integrated with the response to the relevant stimuli and further, the immediate repetition of irrelevant information can retrieve the previously executed response thereby influencing responding to the current target (leading…

Statistical patterns of language use demonstrably affect language comprehension and language production. This study set out to determine whether the variable amount of exposure to such patterns leads to individual differences in reading behavior as measured via eye-movements. Previous studies have demonstrated that more proficient readers are less…

In the literature, the potential efficacy of the gamification of education has been demonstrated. The aim of this study was to explore the influence of applying gamification techniques to increase student engagement in learning. The quasi-experimental nonequivalent-control group design was used with 577 undergraduate students from six classes. The…

The statistical output of interest to most elementary statistics students is the p-value, outputted in computer programs like SPSS, Minitab and SAS. Statistical decisions are sometimes made using these values without understanding the meaning or how these values are calculated. Most elementary statistics textbooks calculates p-values for z-tests…

Individuals can partly recreate the "wisdom of crowds" within their own minds by combining nonredundant estimates they themselves have generated. Herzog and Hertwig (2009) showed that this accuracy gain could be boosted by urging people to actively think differently when generating a 2nd estimate ("dialectical bootstrapping").…

Emotional and behavioral regulation has been linked to coping and enhancement motives and associated with different patterns of alcohol use and problems. The current studies examined emotional instability, urgency, and internal drinking motives as predictors of alcohol dependence symptoms as well as the likelihood and severity of "Diagnostic…

This dataset contains the results of a quasi-experiment, testing Karl Pearson's "drunkard's walk" analogy for an abstract random walk. Inspired by the alternate hypothesis that drunkards stumble to the side of their dominant hand, it includes data on intoxicated test subjects walking a 10' line. Variables include: the…

Evidence evaluation is a crucial process in many human activities, spanning from medical diagnosis to impression formation. The present experiments investigated which, if any, normative model best conforms to people's intuition about the value of the obtained evidence. Psychologists, epistemologists, and philosophers of science have proposed…

We compared 5 different statistics (i.e., G index, gamma, "d'", sensitivity, specificity) used in the social sciences and medical diagnosis literatures to assess calibration accuracy in order to examine the relationship among them and to explore whether one statistic provided a best fitting general measure of accuracy. College…