10 Foundational Quantitative Reasoning Questions: Do Your Students Know To Ask These?
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010Neil Lutsky and Nathan Grawe at Carleton College have developed an excellent set of 10 questions every QR-literate student should know to ask about data. We’ve copied the text of one of their handouts here (with their permission), but there’s also a wealth of materials at the Carleton QR site.
Do your students know to ask these questions?
- What do the numbers show?
- How representative is that?
- Compared to what?
- Is the outcome statistically significant?
- What’s the effect size?
- Are the results those of a single study or of a literature?
- What’s the research design (correlational or experimental)?
- How was the variable operationalized?
- Who’s in the measurement sample?
- Controlling for what?
There is an explanation of what each question means at the QuIRK website. I’d recommend it as reading for anybody teaching anything that is even remotely connected to quantitative arguments.
We are working at getting Nathan Grawe, one of the Carleton QR project leads, on campus in March. If you would be interested in talking with him, email me at mcaulfield@keene.edu.
