The Science of Human Behavior, Measured.
Giorgi Tchumburidze R has a reputation for being intimidating. People hear “programming language” and “statistics” in the same sentence and assume it’s not for them. But R is more approachable than it looks, and the payoff – free, powerful, reproducible data analysis – is enormous. This guide will walk you through everything you need to get started, … Read more
If you’ve studied statistics in a psychology program, you learned classical test theory, even if nobody called it that. Reliability, Cronbach’s alpha, total scores, item-total correlations: all of it belongs to the classical framework. It’s the water most researchers swim in. But there’s another framework, one that underlies nearly all modern large-scale testing – the … Read more
The Likert scale is the workhorse of psychology and the social sciences. “I feel confident in my abilities: strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree.” Assign the numbers 1 through 5, collect responses, compute means, run correlations, publish. It’s so familiar that most researchers never stop to think about what they’re actually doing. They should. … Read more
A student takes a national exam and scores 75 out of 100. The number appears on their certificate, determines their university options, and follows them for years. It looks precise. It looks final. It looks like a fact about the student, in the same way that their height or weight is a fact. It isn’t. … Read more
When we talk about teaching and learning technology, most conversations circle around a few big names. Google Classroom is everywhere in schools. Coursera and edX dominate the online course market. Universities run their own learning management systems, often locked-down platforms that faculty and students learn to tolerate rather than love. But there’s another option that … Read more
Imagine a test where the questions you see depend on how well you’re doing. Get an item right, and the next item gets harder. Get it wrong, and the next one gets easier. The test calibrates itself to you, in real time, item by item, narrowing in on your true ability with each response. This … Read more
Every test, every scale, every measurement instrument in psychology and education starts with the same humble unit: the item. A single question, a single statement, a single decision point. Get the items right, and your measurement has a chance. Get them wrong, and no amount of sophisticated statistics will save you. Yet item writing is … Read more
“How many participants do I need?” It’s probably the single most common question students and early-career researchers ask me when they’re designing a study. And it’s a fair question, you can’t conduct research without knowing how much data to collect. But the honest answer is rarely the one people want to hear. The short version: … Read more
If you studied psychology in Georgia, or in most of the world, really, you learned statistics through SPSS. You opened the data, you clicked through menus, you got tidy output tables, and you wrote up your results. SPSS has been the default statistical software in psychology departments for decades, and that legacy runs deep. But … Read more
If you teach, you give tests. Quizzes, midterms, finals, classroom assessments. They’re a core part of how we measure what students have learned. But here’s a question most teachers never ask: how good are your tests, actually? Most assessment in education is built on intuition. A teacher writes questions that seem fair, grades the results, … Read more