Statistics in Phychology & Education

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THE present day emphasis on measurement and the quantitative treatment of results has made a knowledge of statistical method not only extremely useful but almost necessary to the student of psychology, education, and the social sciences. To those who have been well trained in mathematics, the acquisition of statistical technique offers no particular difficulty. To many otherwise capable students, however, either because of inadequate preparation in mathematics, or because their preparation is not very recent, the application of statistical method to data obtained from test and experiment is more than ordinarily difficult.

It is for this last group of students, especially, that this book has been written. Its primary purpose is to present the subject in a simple and concise form understandable to those who have no previous knowledge of statistical method. With this end in view, theory has everywhere been subordinated to practical application, and numerous illustrations of the various statistical devices have been provided. References have been given, however, for the benefit of those interested in the mathematical theory underlying the methods introduced.

MODERN problems and needs are forcing statistical methods and statistical ideas more and more to the fore. There are so many things we wish to know which cannot be discovered by a single observation, or by a single measurement. We wish to envisage the behaviour of a man who, like all men, is rather a variable quantity, and must be observed repeatedly and not once for all. We wish to study the social group, composed of individuals differing one from another. We should like to be able to compare one group with another, one race with another, as well as one individual with another individual, or the individual with the norm for his age, race or class. We wish to trace the curve which pictures the growth of a child, or of a population. We wish to disentangle the interwoven factors of heredity and environment which influence the development of the individual, and to measure the similarly interwoven effects of laws, social customs and economic conditions upon public health, safety and welfare generally. Even if our statistical appetite is far from keen, we all of us should like to know enough to understand, or to withstand, the statistics that are constantly being thrown at us in print or conversation-much of it pretty bad statistics. The only cure for bad statistics is apparently more and better statistics. All in all, it certainly appears that the rudiments of sound statistical sense are coming to be an essential of a liberal education.

**Contents and Sample Pages**