APS in San Fran 3: Workshop on Teaching the New Stats

Tamarah Smith and Bob presented a workshop on Teaching the New Stats to an almost sold-out crowd. I wasn’t there, but by all reports it went extremely well. Such a workshop seems to me a terrific way to help interested stats teachers introduce the new stats into their own teaching.

After taking that first step, it may all get easier, because, in my experience, teaching the new stats brings its own reward, in that students understand better and therefore feel better. So we the teachers will also feel the joy.

Tamarah and Bob’s slides are here. It strikes me as a wonderful collection, with numerous links to useful resources, and great advice about presenting an appealing and up-to-date course to beginning students. Also, indeed, to more advanced students. It’s well worth browsing those slides. Here are a few points that struck me as I browsed:

**You can download the workshop files, and follow along.

**You may know that jamovi and JASP are open source applications for statistical analysis designed to supersede commercial applications, notably SPSS. They are more user friendly, as well as being extensible by anyone. Already, add-on modules written in R are beginning to appear. (These are exciting developments, worth trying out.)

**Bob is developing add-ons for jamovi for the new statistics. (Eventually, jamovi augmented by Bob’s modules may replace ESCI–with the great advantages of providing data file management and a gateway to the power and scope of a full data analysis application.)

**The workshop discussed three simple examples (comparison of two independent means, comparison of two independent proportions, and estimation of interactions).

**The first example (independent means) was discussed in most detail, with a comparison of traditional NHST analysis, and new-stats analysis using ESCI then jamovi (with Bob’s add-on); then a Bayesian credible-interval approach. Then meta-analysis, to emphasise that estimation thinking and meta-analytic thinking are essential frameworks for the new stats.

**The GAISE guidelines were used to frame the discussion of the pedagogical approach. There is lots on encouraging students to think and judge in context–which should warm the heart of any insightful stats teacher.

**There are examples of students’ responses to illustrate the presenters’ conviction that conceptual understanding is better when using the new stats.

**There’s a highly useful discussion of a range of statistical software for new-stats learning and data analysis.

There’s lots more, but I’ll close with the neat summary below of the new-stats approach, which is now best ethical practice for conducting research and inferential data analysis.

Geoff