Statistics is not the subject most psychology students are feverishly looking forward to. Fears and doubts about its relevance are quite common. This is especially pronounced at our institution, a large distance-teaching university with highly heterogeneous students. We recognized three clusters of students that might need special support: (1)…

When people interpret the outcome of a research study, do they consider other relevant information such as prior research? In the current study, 251 college graduates read a single brief fictitious news article. The article summarized the findings of a study that found positive results for a new drug. Three versions of the article varied the…

Statistical thinking is essential to understanding the nature of scientific results as a consumer. Statistical thinking also facilitates thinking like a scientist. Instead of emphasizing a "correct" procedure for data analysis and its outcome, statistical thinking focuses on the process of data analysis. This article reviews frequentist…

Psychology graduates are employed in a wide variety of workplace roles. The broad nature of these future workplace requirements can make it difficult for students to learn and apply classroom knowledge and challenging for educators to develop authentic and engaging materials. In research methods and statistics courses in particular it can be…

Psychology students often feel anxious about learning statistics, which can impact their performance. However, little research has explored statistics confidence, which may be an important way to reduce the negative connotations of associating statistics with anxiety. We aimed to explore whether modifying an existing measure of statistics anxiety…

The primary goal of this article is to provide detailed instructions as to how to run a mindset intervention in a psychology statistics course. A secondary goal is to provide preliminary data on such an intervention's relationship to students' statistics anxiety and course grades. Large randomized studies have demonstrated that using a one-time…

Reflective learning entails a thoughtful learning process through which one not only learns a particular piece of knowledge or skill, but better understands "how" one learned it--knowledge that can then be transferred well beyond the scope of the specific learning experience. This type of thinking empowers learners by making them more…