The Science of Human Behavior, Measured.
Every summer, thousands of Georgian school-leavers sit the Unified National Examinations, rank the university programs they want, and are placed according to their scores. The results are a goldmine of data about what students want, what they can access, and how a whole academic field is structured. This year I pulled together the numbers for … Read more
Say you’ve found a well-validated English questionnaire, a depression scale, a personality inventory, a measure of job satisfaction, and you want to use it in your own country, in your own language. The obvious first move is to translate it. Get a good translator, convert the items, and start collecting data. This is exactly the … Read more
Think about what happens when someone tells you they went to a restaurant. You don’t need them to explain that they were seated, looked at a menu, ordered from a waiter, ate, paid, and left. You already know all of that. You have a mental template, a script for how a restaurant visit unfolds, and … Read more
The p-value is the most used and most misunderstood number in all of statistics. It appears in nearly every empirical paper in psychology, medicine, and the social sciences. Researchers chase it, reviewers demand it, and careers are built on getting it below a certain threshold. And yet, if you ask most people who use p-values … Read more
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