Assessing psychology students' difficulties with conditional probability and Bayesian reasoning.

Conditional probability and Bayesian reasoning are important to psychology students because they are involved in the understanding of classical and Bayesian inference, regression and correlation, linear models, multivariate analysis and other statistical procedures that are often used in psychological research. A study of previous literature showed that there is considerable research on this topic, but no comprehensive questionnaires have been developed to globally assess students' understanding and misconceptions on these topics. At the University of Granada we started building a questionnaire, which takes into account the content of conditional probability taught in the Spanish universities to psychology students, as well as the biases and misconceptions described in the literature. In this work we will describe the process of developing the questionnaire and will report the results from a sample of 206 psychology students.