When people interpret the outcome of a research study, do they consider other relevant information such as prior research? In the current study, 251 college graduates read a single brief fictitious news article. The article summarized the findings of a study that found positive results for a new drug. Three versions of the article varied the…

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…

Missing values that fail to be appropriately accounted for may lead to reduced statistical power, biased estimators, reduced representativeness of the sample, and incorrect interpretations and conclusions (Gorelick, 2006). The current study provided an ontological perspective of data manipulation by explaining how statistical results can…

Though statistics is covered in secondary-school curricula, it is usually limited to few lessons and mainly taught in a procedural approach. There seems to be a gap between the education of mathematics teachers and the demands on their practice. Learning statistics from a mathematical perspective does not qualify to teach the subject properly.…

We describe a semester-long project for an introductory statistics class that studies the broken windows theory of policing and the related issues of race, policing, and criminal justice. The most impactful feature of the project is the data-collection phase, in which students attend and observe a public arraignment court session. This "Court…

As literature has reported, it is usual that university students in statistics courses, and even statistics teachers, interpret the confidence level associated with a confidence interval as the probability that the parameter value will be between the lower and upper interval limits. To confront this misconception, class activities have been…

A news story claiming that the cream filling of a popular "double" cream sandwich cookie is not really "double" went viral in fall 2013. A high school mathematics teacher posted a blog entry describing how he and his students measured 20 cookies, analyzed the data, and concluded that the double cream cookies had only 1.86 times…

Quantitative and statistical literacy are core domains in the undergraduate psychology curriculum. An important component of such literacy includes interpretation of visual aids, such as tables containing results from statistical analyses. This article presents results of a quasi-experimental study with longitudinal follow-up that tested the…

Data is everywhere. As a result the need for data scientists with the correct skill set to analyze and interpret the data has escalated. Not surprisingly, data scientists are currently one of the most wanted professions. Tertiary institutions are faced with the challenge of producing students with the correct blend of theoretical knowledge and…

How does the student untrained in advanced statistics interpret results of research that reports a group difference? In two studies, statistically untrained college students were presented with abstracts or professional associations' reports and asked for estimates of scores obtained by the original participants in the studies. These estimates…

Every day, students collect, organize, and analyze data to make decisions. In this data-driven world, people need to assess how much trust they can place in summary statistics. The results of every survey and the safety of every drug that undergoes a clinical trial depend on the correct application of appropriate statistics. Recognizing the…

Correlated predictors in regression models are a fact of life in applied social science research. The extent to which they are correlated will influence the estimates and statistics associated with the other variables they are modeled along with. These effects, for example, may include enhanced regression coefficients for the other variables--a…

With developing technology statistical information and data sources become a very important issues and from primary school it has become necessary to gain the skills for making interpreting and making sense of data. These skills consist of collecting information, arrangement and analysis of collected data and the interpretation of the results. The…

Information on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Southern Africa is often interpreted through a veil of secrecy and shame and, I argue, with flawed understanding of basic statistics. This research determined the levels of statistical literacy evident in 316 future Mathematical Literacy teachers' explanations of the median in the context of HIV/AIDS…

The use of confidence intervals (CIs) as an addition or as an alternative to null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) has been promoted as a means to make researchers more aware of the uncertainty that is inherent in statistical inference. Little is known, however, about whether presenting results via CIs affects how readers judge the…