A New Way to Teach (or Compute) Pearson's r Without Reliance on Cross-Products


Authors: 
Schuyler W. Huck, Bixiang Ren & Hongwei Yang
Volume: 
29 (1)
Pages: 
online
Year: 
2007
Publisher: 
Teaching Statistics
URL: 
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/toc/test/29/1
Abstract: 

Many students have difficulty seeing the conceptual 'link' between bivariate data displayed in a scatterplot and the statistical summary of the relationship, r. This article shows how to teach (and compute) r such that each datum's 'direct' and 'indirect' influences are made apparent and used in a new formula for calculating Pearson's r.

The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education

register