Teaching Fall 2009

I teach Quantitative Methods for Psychologists 1 this term (and 2 next term). This course is designed for first year PhD students in psychology. This document is live, in the sense things will be updated. I will place slides on the web at least the evening before the lecture (but hopefully on the Monday).

It is 9-11:50 on Wednesday mornings, room TBA.

Teaching assistant: Daniella Villalba (daniella.villalba@gmail.com)

My Office hours will be Monday. This will be mostly to go through your presentations. Email me (dwright@fiu.edu) for a time.

Learning Outcomes

    Basics statistics and graphical procedures.

Requirements

    40% journal (details below)

    10% two how-to pages (one in SPSS/PASW and one in R)

    40% essay (broadly defined)

    10% final presentation

            90%    A-            93%     A

            80%    B-            83%     B        87%        B+

            70%    C-            73%     C        77%        C+

            60%    D-            63%     D        67%        D+   

            below F

    For PhDs, less than a B may create problems for your funding.

    Cheating. Don't (you'll lose your funding and place).

Note on Due dates. These are towards the end of term. So, keep up with journal, and have your essay started well in advance.

Journal (50%)

    Most weeks you will have little assignments and exercises to do. Keep these in a folder. They are due the first day of presentations. Most should not take very long.

How-to pages (10%, 5% each)

    You will each write one page for doing an example in SPSS/PASW and one page for doing an example in R. You will present these in class (and we will go through your talk on the Monday) and you will produce a document (in Word, html, powerpoint, or whatever) and this will be placed on the web.

Final Presentation (15%)

    In that last couple of weeks all of you will present an empirical study (yours, a faculty members, a really cool paper in the field, etc.). It will be a short presentation and the focus is on how you present the results (i.e., the stats, graphs). It will often be necessary to recreate graphs.

Essay (25%)

    Due at final presentation.

    Length will be maximum 4000.

    Lots of options:

        Write an R function or SPSS/PASW function and include a report on this function.

        Book review on a statistics book (but not a standard textbook)

        What is measurement?

        If you have an idea, ask me, and if I okay it, it is fine.

Reading

    It takes longer to read a page of statistics than a page of psychology. I know that, so don't worry, I won't be giving you a hundred pages to read every week.

Books. The first term covers basic statistics and introduces you to two of the most used statistical packages. We will follow the basic structure of:

    Wright, D. B. & London, K. (2009). First (and Second) Steps in Statistics (2nd ed). London: Sage. Amazon. Sage. both $40, but $27 for new on Amazon book sellers.

Historically, one of the packages is PASW/SPSS, which some of you may have covered. It is owed by IBM and the following book works both as a reference book for SPSS and it also introduces the statistical concepts. I think this is the best of these books. It will make you smile (or cringe) while reading stats, which must be a good thing.

    Field, A.P. (2009). Discovering statistics using SPSS: and sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll (third edition). London: Sage publications. Amazon. $68. There are older versions of this around, but the new version does a lot more.

In this course we will focus more on the statistics than on the sex or the drugs or the rock'n'roll.

The second software system is R, which is rapidly growing in academic circles and beyond. There are about a 100 books on it, but also much that is freely available (as is the program, it is free). I think we can get by just using free sources for this course.

Articles

    Throughout this course there will the odd article. I will try to choose ones that can be accessed electronically through the FIU library page.

Course Structure

    The typical lecture will be me talking for about 118 minutes on the topic, having a 2 minute break for coffee, and then two or three of you presenting "how-to" exercises.

Hurricanes: Term may get interrupted. Assignment deadlines still hold, we will just push topics into the Spring term. The university is good about telling people if it is closed (get it so they txt you). They sometimes will close because a storm is heading for the Keys because we are a shelter for Monroe county.

Reading (* required, # worth doing).

Week 1. Introduction, why statistics, what are SPSS/PASW and R, and making graphs.

       Reading

            *  Chapter 1 of first steps.

            *  The following introduction to R: Chapter One PDF

            #  On making bad graphs here.

            #   Facets of R (Chambers, 2009).

       Journal:

            Find a really bad graph and bring it to class to show others. Email (dwright@fiu.edu) it to me if you want it on powerpoint.   

            Try downloading R onto some machine you have access to.

        Slides (not yet!)

        Data (not yet!)

        Examples