A quasi-experimental comparison of spreadsheet- and classroom-based statistics tutorials

Abstract

This article reports an evaluation of a set of eight spreadsheet-based tutorials developed for the statistics portion of an undergraduate psychology research methods course. The evaluation involved a quasi-experimental comparison of spreadsheet-based and traditional classroom teaching methods in a course that gave equal teaching time to both solutions, and took the unique approach of investigating both outcomes-based and attitudinal measures in the same study. Compared to traditional pen-and-paper-based tutorials, the spreadsheet-based tutorials improved student outcomes-based performance on an end-of-semester test. After using the spreadsheet-based tutorials, student attitudes towards the course material were found to have improved on some, but not all, of the measures used. Taken together, these results indicate that spreadsheet-based tutorials may be advantageous in the teaching of statistics, although effect sizes were small to moderate.