Unit 2: Empirical Science & Statistics

This unit covers:

• basics of the scientific method
• statistical tools for educational research

Learning outcomes

1. Be able to competently use the terminology of empirical science, such as theory, hypothesis, experiment, null hypothesis.
2. Be able to understand, explain, and evaluate empirical science research in the domain of education research.
3. Be able to qualitatively explain the purpose and use of statistical hypothesis tests.

Pre-session task

Watch the Veritasium video below on the Replication Crisis of Science and answer these guiding questions on on Slido:

1. What is (in your words) the meaning of the p-value?
2. Name a suggestion to counter the “reproducibility crisis” in empirical science.

Material

• slides

• Video · transcript (2022-10-14, 47:17): The Scientific Method, hypothesis testing, pitfalls

  
  Chapters

  5:09 Experiment
  5:53 Statistics
  7:20 What's the Scientific Method
  7:42 The Scientific Method
  11:48 Motivated Expectancy Value Theory
  14:09 Controlled Experiment
  16:53 Prove the Hypothesis
  17:20 Null Hypothesis
  25:56 Example for the Student T-Test
  28:31 Gold Standard of Controlled Experiments
  31:47 Observational Studies
  32:18 Confounding Variable
  35:06 Observational Study
  36:07 Gold Standard
  40:41 False Positives
  41:09 Publication Bias
  43:24 Statistical Significance
  

Further resources

• Crash Course Statistics
  accessible YouTube series giving some more details and lots of examples of how to use statistical methods

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Unit 1  ⋅  Syllabus  ⋅  Unit 3