Lecture and Lab Things

David C. Howell

On this page I have attempted to collect a number of examples, demonstrations, and exercises that can be used to motivate a lecture, demonstrate an important point, or create a laboratory exercise for students. Because there are two bo oks involved, Statistical Methods for Psychology (4th ed.) and Fundamental Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences (3rd ed.), I sometimes have trouble balancing the differing needs of two audiences. However, I have tried to build in sufficien t flexibility that the material can be modified to meet specific goals.

I am initially setting up this material with the Methods book in mind--you have to start someplace. Thus I will index each entry by the chapters in that book. I will also cross-index them, however, by the chapters in the Fundamentals book. U nfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, the material does not always fit neatly into a specific chapter. I say "fortunately" because much of this material is integrative in nature and pulls together ideas from several chapters.

I am not so naive or so arrogant as to think that I will be able to come up with the optimal set of exercises and demonstrations. I would be delighted to hear from anyone who has changes to suggest. I would be particularly interested to hear from students with ideas of how this material could be better adapted to their needs as learners. Messages can be sent to me at David.Howell@uvm.edu.

One thing that I have found useful is to assign a project in which the students have to go to the literature, find a study that interests them, generate the data, and write up their results. Such as assignment is gi ven here as a starting point, though it could be modified extensively.

Many of these topics are not yet filled in, so don't be too annoyed when you click on something and find that there is nothing there. I'm working on it.

I am starting (2/1/97) to convert some of the laboratory assignments that I am using for my class, which is using the Methods book. The students use SPSS, and much of what is there assumes SPSS, although it is often not a requirement. I am breaking the assignments up into single chunks, so as to make them more flexible for other people's needs. They were originally written in Word 6.0, and I have used the html conversion that comes with Word. Although I do clean them up a bit with a text editor and html code, do not expect elegance. The data and syntax files, where appropriate, are linked to the pages. You will pretty much stumble upon the labs if you click on the links in the table below (especially the last half of the table), and they can often be identified by the word 'lab" somewhere in the title or something more specific in the description. Let me know if they work for you, or if you have suggestions for improvement.

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Last revised: 7/14/98