J David Eisenberg has written a great new tutorial on hypothesis testing and here is a guest post from him for the SOFA blog. Enjoy:
I teach a psychology research methods course at a local community college. Every semester, I see the students’ confusion about hypothesis testing and significance levels. Even at the end of the semester, there are always a few students who think that a statistical result with a probability of .001 must *not* be significant, because the number is so small.
I do explain the concept during one lecture, but that just doesn’t do the trick. I could write a web page with the explanation, but I’m sure I’d get a TL; DR [1] from the students. So, I decided to make the explanation in the form of a visual novel [2] (VN). I used the Ren’py [3] visual novel engine to create the script, and it worked fine. The problem is, you need to download a fairly large file in order to display the VN; again, something that students would probably not be eager to do. The solution, which Grant [Developer of SOFA Statistics] suggested, was to make it all web-based. After some failed experiments with canvas and SVG, I was able to achieve the effects I wanted with HTML, CSS,and JavaScript. The result is at http://evc-cit.info/psych018/hyptest/
[1] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/TLDR
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_novel
[3] http://www.renpy.org/
