Allen Peter J, Roberts Lynne D, Baughman Frank D, Loxton Natalie J, Van Rooy Dirk, Rock Adam J, Finlay James
School of Psychology and Speech Pathology, Curtin University Perth, WA, Australia.
School of Applied Psychology, Griffith University Brisbane, QLD, Australia.
Front Psychol. 2016 Feb 29;7:288. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00288. eCollection 2016.
Although essential to professional competence in psychology, quantitative research methods are a known area of weakness for many undergraduate psychology students. Students find selecting appropriate statistical tests and procedures for different types of research questions, hypotheses and data types particularly challenging, and these skills are not often practiced in class. Decision trees (a type of graphic organizer) are known to facilitate this decision making process, but extant trees have a number of limitations. Furthermore, emerging research suggests that mobile technologies offer many possibilities for facilitating learning. It is within this context that we have developed StatHand, a free cross-platform application designed to support students' statistical decision making. Developed with the support of the Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching, StatHand guides users through a series of simple, annotated questions to help them identify a statistical test or procedure appropriate to their circumstances. It further offers the guidance necessary to run these tests and procedures, then interpret and report their results. In this Technology Report we will overview the rationale behind StatHand, before describing the feature set of the application. We will then provide guidelines for integrating StatHand into the research methods curriculum, before concluding by outlining our road map for the ongoing development and evaluation of StatHand.
尽管定量研究方法对于心理学专业能力至关重要，但对于许多本科心理学学生来说，它是一个已知的薄弱领域。学生们发现，为不同类型的研究问题、假设和数据类型选择合适的统计检验和程序特别具有挑战性，而且这些技能在课堂上并不经常练习。决策树（一种图形组织者）已知有助于这一决策过程，但现有的决策树有一些局限性。此外，新出现的研究表明，移动技术为促进学习提供了许多可能性。正是在这种背景下，我们开发了StatHand，这是一款免费的跨平台应用程序，旨在支持学生进行统计决策。在澳大利亚政府学习与教学办公室的支持下开发的StatHand，通过一系列简单的、有注释的问题引导用户，帮助他们确定适合其情况的统计检验或程序。它还提供运行这些检验和程序、解释和报告结果所需的指导。在本技术报告中，我们将概述StatHand背后的基本原理，然后描述该应用程序的功能集。然后，我们将提供将StatHand整合到研究方法课程中的指导方针，最后概述StatHand持续开发和评估的路线图。
