By Evelin Haász, Attila Krajcsi
Information
The main goal of our work is to create an adaptation to an already existing statistical manual to help students learn the fundamentals of statistics and the use of statistical software, CogStat. Our work’s starting point is the Statistics Lab Manual of Matthew Crump, which is a supplement to his book, Answering Questions With Data, employing the software R. Our adaptation is built around the software CogStat, which has two main features: automatic data analysis, and an optimised output, that shows results in an easily interpretable and coherent way. This makes analysing data faster and understanding the results easier for both students and researchers. In this case, the adaptation is not trivial because the automatic nature of the data analysis means different challenges for the user and the teachers in contrast to manual data analysis and coding. The specific issues of the adaptation in general and the issues caused by the different design principles of software packages are discussed. In our work, we aim to present some of the best practices of education-related adaptation, based on our own experiences gained through our statistical manual adaptation.