Erm, the students are not expected to understand the math, and are not being tested on their understanding of the math. The professor doesn’t understand the math either. I mean that there is epsilon chance that any given psychology professor, especially an educational psychology professor, has ever heard the phrase “sigma algebra”. If they have, it’s because they’re math hobbyists, not because it’s ever come up in their professional work.
In a psychology course, “runs a multiple regression” means “follows a specific procedure analogous to a computer program”. The whole thing is a black box. The decision about when it’s valid to use that procedure is made based on various rules of thumb, which are passed around mostly as folklore, and are themselves understood and followed with varying degrees of conscienciousness. The same applies to the question of what the results mean.
It’s absolutely a valid criticism that people in fields like psychology tend to misapply statistical methods and misunderstand statistical results. They do need an intuitive understanding of what they’re doing, good enough to know when they can apply the method and what the results actually show. And it’s true that most of them probably don’t have that understanding.
On the other hand, it’s also true that you don’t need to understand the math at a very deep level to use the techniques practically. They don’t need to be able to derive the method from first principals, nor to be able to rigorously prove that everything works, nor to recognize pathological corner cases that will literally never be encountered in real applications. Those are unreasonable things to ask. Remember that their goal is to understand psychology, not to understand mathematics.
Students in all kinds of science and engineering are allowed to use instruments that they couldn’t build themselves, and practitioners still more so. They’re not expected to understand every possible corner-case limitation of those instruments, either. At most they’re given some rules for when they can or can’t use and rely on an instrument.
It’s still a really lame question, though, and the fact that it’s asked does show a problem. Nobody seems to be looking for even an intuitive grasp of all the stuff that’s lurking in that word “expect”.
Erm, the students are not expected to understand the math, and are not being tested on their understanding of the math. The professor doesn’t understand the math either. I mean that there is epsilon chance that any given psychology professor, especially an educational psychology professor, has ever heard the phrase “sigma algebra”. If they have, it’s because they’re math hobbyists, not because it’s ever come up in their professional work.
In a psychology course, “runs a multiple regression” means “follows a specific procedure analogous to a computer program”. The whole thing is a black box. The decision about when it’s valid to use that procedure is made based on various rules of thumb, which are passed around mostly as folklore, and are themselves understood and followed with varying degrees of conscienciousness. The same applies to the question of what the results mean.
It’s absolutely a valid criticism that people in fields like psychology tend to misapply statistical methods and misunderstand statistical results. They do need an intuitive understanding of what they’re doing, good enough to know when they can apply the method and what the results actually show. And it’s true that most of them probably don’t have that understanding.
On the other hand, it’s also true that you don’t need to understand the math at a very deep level to use the techniques practically. They don’t need to be able to derive the method from first principals, nor to be able to rigorously prove that everything works, nor to recognize pathological corner cases that will literally never be encountered in real applications. Those are unreasonable things to ask. Remember that their goal is to understand psychology, not to understand mathematics.
Students in all kinds of science and engineering are allowed to use instruments that they couldn’t build themselves, and practitioners still more so. They’re not expected to understand every possible corner-case limitation of those instruments, either. At most they’re given some rules for when they can or can’t use and rely on an instrument.
It’s still a really lame question, though, and the fact that it’s asked does show a problem. Nobody seems to be looking for even an intuitive grasp of all the stuff that’s lurking in that word “expect”.