The use of significance tests in science has been debated from the invention of thesetests until the present time. Apart from theoretical critiques on their appropriateness forevaluating scientific hypotheses, significance tests also receive criticism for inviting mi-sinterpretations. We presented six common misinterpretations to psychologists whowork in German universities and found out that they are still surprisingly widespread -even among instructors who teach statistics to psychology students. Although these mi-sinterpretations are well documented among students, until now there has been littleresearch on pedagogical methods to remove them. Rather, they are considered "hardfacts" that are impervious to correction. We discuss the roots of these misinterpretationsand propose a pedagogical concept to teach significance tests, which involves explainingthe meaning of statistical significance in an appropriate way
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