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Growth mindset fails to increase grades or non-cognitive skills. What now?
Growth mindset is a popular classroom intervention which attempts to change children’s views towards studying and class work. The core principle is teaching students their brain has the potential to grow by exerting mental effort during challenging tasks. This will increase the pupil’s willingness to persevere with work, and will subsequently improve their grades (Dweck,…
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How to anonymise/pseudonymise your open data in R
Anonymising data, especially if it includes personal details like addresses or voting patterns, is very important if you want to share your data or results. Due to GDPR, all data collected in the E.U. has to be either anonymised or pseudonymised when used in ways other than what was initially intended[note]The benefits of doing so…
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Should you analyse ordinal data like interval or ratio data?
A couple of months ago, I wrote a summary of a recent paper arguing you shouldn’t analyse ordinal data like interval or ratio. If you do so, there’s a risk of inflated Type I and Type II error rates, as well as reduced power [zotpressInText item=”{VD8XETGZ}”][note]Open access version here[/note]. In response, Helen Wauck wrote a…
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Should you calculate a p-value when there isn’t randomisation?
The thought behind this question was prompted by reading [zotpressInText item=”{TIBTBKWD}” format=”%a% (%d%, %p%)”], which argues against frequentist inferential statistics. One of the arguments refers to an underlying assumption required to compute p-values; they need random sampling. Without this, a p-value is meaningless. But this is rare in social science research [zotpressInText item=”{VRZPC486}” format=”%a% (%d%,…
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Year in Review: 2018
Being a reflective practitioner is highly encouraged in my profession. We are always being asked to think back on an activity or our work, critique ourselves and our practice, looking for areas of strength and weakness. It, therefore, felt natural to apply this to my blogging. What were the goals at the start of the…
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Best reads of 2018
These are some of the most interesting article I’ve read in 2018. They don’t have to have been published this year (many aren’t), the only criteria is I came across them this year. Hopefully you find some of them interesting! Coding ‘Why Women in Psychology Can’t Program’ by Olivia Guest. A take-down of the idea…
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Do bilinguals enjoy enhanced executive functioning?
Many believe people who speak more than one language are smarter (just Google ‘bilingualism’ and ‘smarter’ and you’ll see many articles putting this idea forward). This popular meme arose due to a number of studies finding bilinguals scored higher on executive functioning (EF) tests compared to monolinguals [zotpressInText item=”{5421944:ZY8QPLW8}”]. Executive functioning is a broad concept…
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The lazy person’s perspective on programming: why you should code
Lots of people (myself included) bang on about coding. How great it is, how valuable it’s been, etc. You’re probably a bit bored of it. But if you’re not just yet, allow me to explain why it is probably a good idea for you to pick it up. Why am I uniquely qualified to do…
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You can’t assume a normal distribution for your data with N>30
The central limit theorem (CLT) is one of the most foundational concepts in all probability (Daly, 2013). It is commonly understood as: when the means of a variable with a suitable number of observations is plotted on a graph, it can form a normal distribution. When the data comes from many independent and random events, the sum…
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