Professor Matt Bower

Statistics notes from Statistical Methods on Psychology by David Howell

Central Limit Theorem: Given a population with mean mu and variance sigma squared, the sampling distribution of the mean (distribution of sample means) will have a mean of mu and a variance of sigma squared divided by n. The distribution will approach the normal distribution as n, the sample size, increases. (pg170)

Note that “standard error” is the same as the “standard deviation” of a sampling distribution.

If the standard deviation of the population is known then statistical tests can use Z scores (although larger n does help as the distribution will be closer to the normal distribution.

If the population standard deviation is unknown then the distribution of the mean has a Student’s t distribution, where

and    .

Note the degrees of freedom for the test statistic is n-1 where n is the number of observations that are made to derive the sample mean.

Chapter 6 – Categorical Data and Chi-square

• A multinomial distribution is one that has a range of possible mutually exclusive and exhaustive outcomes for each event, for instance rolling a number greater than three, a number starting with the letter T, or a one. The probability of an event is given by
  
• A chi-square distribution is a particular type of mathematical distribution used for several statistical tests. Probably the most common of these is the Pearson’s Chi-Square test. The chi-square distribution is related to the gamma function which is very much like a continuous form of the factorial function. It’s formula is given by:
  Note the chi-square distribution has only one parameter k which becomes the degrees of freedom when performing statistical tests. The distribution only takes on values for x>0 and becomes more spread out as k increases. As a matter of fact, for the chi-square distribution the mean is k and the variance is 2k   !!

  

• A chi-square goodness of fit test asks whether observed frequencies in different categories are significantly different from the expected frequencies if the null hypothesis were true. The chi-square test statistic is given by
  
  For one-way categorisation of data the degrees of freedom = C-1.
  For two way categorisation where we are testing contingency tables (whether the two dimensions are independent of one another) we calculate Eij = RiCj/N and the degrees of freedom is = (R-1)(C-1).
• If measuring continuous data Yates suggests correcting for continuity by reducing the absolute value of each numerator by 0.5 before squaring, however some statisticians argue against this.
• Small expected frequencies mean that the distribution is unable to accurately approximate the chi-square distribution, so a general (conservative) rule of thumb is to expect that all expected frequencies should be at least 5 (pg 149)
• An alternative to the chi-square test is Fisher’s Exact test, which is useful in situations where there are few observations because it does not based on the chi-square distribution.
• Another alternative is to use likelihood ratio tests, which sum  obs* ln(obs/exp) to calculate the chi-square statistic. The
• Chi-square tests require independence of observations – for instance that two observations are not from responses by the same participant. This is distinct from testing independence of variables, for instance that a person’s weight and height categorisation are independent. Be sure to always include non-occurences (for instance people who do not like the idea of daylight savings time as well as those who do).
• Effect sizes can be measured using differences between groups or levels of the independent variable (d-family measures) or the correlation between the two independent variables (r-family). D-family measures of effect size include the risk ratio and odds ration. R-family measures include phi and Cramers V.
• The Kappa statistic does not use the chi-square distribution but is based on contingency tables, and is used to measure agreement between two measurers.

At Macquarie we are developing a system to record micro teaching sessions and have students provide reflective comments about them. The videos are going to be captured using Podcast Capture, Photobooth, or some such tool. Then students will upload them to the new video server that has been setup. Finally an Eportfolio tool such as Mahara will be used for students to view recordings and write reflective comments (either relating to their own performance or of the presentations of others). For example the video below may be created:

The students’ reflective comments could be placed here (they could be given a template to semi-structure these reflections) and then peer reflections could be added as comments on the page).