Category Archives: statistics

The importance of neutral results

This is the third posting in this morning’s trilogy about research methods, and this one was prompted by an article in this month’s issue of Physics World : Ball, P. (May 2016), No result, no problem? Physics World, 29(5), 38-41. … Continue reading

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The unscientific method

The title of this post is copied from another New Scientist article, this time by Sonia van Gilder Cooke, and published in Issue number 3069 (16th April 2016) on pages 39-41. The article starts “Listening to When I’m Sixty-Four by The Beatles … Continue reading

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Simpson’s paradox

Back in November, I posted about the fact that I was going to be more bullish about the fact that I am a physicist but that I do educational research. As I try to build my confidence to say some … Continue reading

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More lies, damned lies and statistics

This second ‘rant of the day’ focuses on practice which, I think, arises from the fact that most people are not as fortunate(?) as me in having data from hundreds and thousands of students on each module each year. It … Continue reading

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Victorian clergymen

This is more ‘rant of the day’ than ‘quote of the day’ but I’d like to start with a quote from my own ‘Maths for Science’ (though I’m indebted to my co-author Pat Murphy who actually wrote this bit): ” … Continue reading

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Distractors for multiple-choice questions

I’ve just been asked a question (well, actually three questions) about the summative use of multiple-choice questions. I don’t know the answer. Can anyone help? If we want 3 correct answers, what’s the recommended number of distractors? If we want 4 … Continue reading

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Random guess scores

As an extension to my daughter Helen’s  iCMA statistics project, random guess scores were calculated for multiple choice, multiple response and drag and drop questions in a number of different situations (e.g. with different numbers of attempts, different scoring algorithms, different … Continue reading

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iCMA statistics

This work was originally reported on the website of  COLMSCT (the Centre for the Open Learning of Mathematics, Science, Computing and Mathematics) – and other work was reported on the piCETL (the Physics Innovations Centre for Excellence in Teaching and … Continue reading

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Overall impact of different variants of questions

You may be relieved to hear that this will be my final posting (at least for a while) on our use of different variants of interactive computer-marked assignment (iCMA) questions. We know that, whilst the different variants of many questions are … Continue reading

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Investigating whether variants of a question are of equivalent difficulty

We have devised a range of tools to determine whether or not the variants of a question are of equivalent difficulty.

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