Re:Why We Need a Statistical Revolution
by glesica on Sunday May 17, 2015 @12:44PM
(#9560670)
The dangers of fishing for p values (to focus on those paragraphs) are covered pretty extensively in undergraduate courses in, at the very least, economics and political science. Something happens between that point, and the point at which a researcher is trying to publish in a journal. I think it is fairly obvious that the problem is related to competition for funding and advancement. Of course this is probably a much more difficult problem to solve.
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There's another potential source of the problem: the time gap in between those undergraduate lessons are learned in the abstract and the later point in time when the exercise if those lessons is required. Unexercised knowledge atrophies like any other muscle.
Perhaps rather than placing so much emphasis on memorization recall exams, undergraduate evaluation should be based on exercising the research and peer review process. The best way to learn research is to do research.
That's what we did in undergraduate. Practically every class I had required a research paper. We didn't always have to use statistics, but we were graded on methodology. Recall exams were rare, most exams involved interpretation and explanation. Of course I studied political science, things may be different in other fields.