Teaching and Learning Zone: Statistics

Excellence in statistics education

On our methods modules, you’ll be taught statistics and psychological research methods within the framework of Open Science and reproducibility. We teach cutting edge topics rarely taught elsewhere (e.g., robust methods, and Bayesian methods) and we’re one of only a handful of institutions in the UK that teach the open source statistics packages R and RStudio.

Learning Statistics

Our Psychological Methods teaching team, led by internationally known textbook author and educator Prof Andy Field, is at the cutting edge of research methods and statistics education. Here you can find details of Andy's introductory texts and additional tutorials to give some grounding in learning about statistics.

• Books

  Field, A. P. (2022). An Adventure in Statistics: The Reality Enigma (2nd ed.). SAGE Publications.

  Field, A. P. (2017). Discovering Statistics Using IBM SPSS Statistics (5th ed.). SAGE Publications.

  Field, A. P. (2012). Discovering Statistics Using R. SAGE Publications.

• Interactive Tutorials
  Milan Valášek’s Interactive Visualisations of Statistics Concepts.
  
  Milan Valášek’s Visual Explainer of Principle Components Analysis.
• Video Tutorials

  Andy Field’s SPSS Tutorials.

• Talks

  Andy Field on Teaching Statistics: Keynote at Teaching Statistics in Psychology.
  
  Andy Field on Using Learnr to Teach Statistics at Lancaster Teaching R Seminar.

Learning Bayesian Statistics

Our team also includes Prof Zoltan Dienes, an internationally known expert in Bayesian statistics. Zoltan has written extensively about using Bayes factors, and you can read more about it on his website or in his books and papers. 

• Books

  Dienes, Z. (2008). Understanding Psychology as a Science: An Introduction to Scientific and Statistical Inference. Bloomsbury Publishing.

• Papers

  Dienes, Z. (2021). How to use and report Bayesian hypothesis tests. Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practise, 8(1), 9–26. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/bua5n
  
  Dienes, Z. (2021). Obtaining evidence for no effect. Collbra: Psychology, 7(1), Article 28202. https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.28202
  
  Dienes, Z. (2019). How do I know what my theory predicts? Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 2(4), 364–377. https://doi.org/10.1177/2515245919876960
  
  Dienes, Z., & Mclatchie, N. (2018). Four reasons to prefer Bayesian analyses over significance testing. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 25(1), 207–218. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-017-1266-z
  
  Dienes, Z. (2014). Using Bayes to get the most out of non-significant results. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00781
  
  Dienes, Z. (2011). Bayesian versus orthodox statistics: Which side are you on? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(3), 274–290. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691611406920

• Video Tutorials

  Zoltan Dienes' Basic Introduction to Bayes Factors.
  
  Zoltan Dienes' Workshop on Bayes Factors.

• Online Courses

  Lincoln Colling’s Advanced Statistical Methods: Bayesian Statistics. 

• Calculators
  Zoltan Dienes has released an online Bayes factor calculator for performing Bayesian analyses. It is also possible to perform these calculations with Lincoln Colling’s Bayesplay R package and web-app and in JASP.  

Learning R

As well as running undergraduate and postgraduate taught modules in statistics, our team run workshops for researchers on Open Science, R and RStudio, and statistical practice. Our major goal for 2019-2022 was to train the entire research community within the School of Psychology to be proficient in R and RStudio. In 2017, we reviewed the postgraduate curriculum so that all methods teaching used R, and the undergraduate curriculum underwent a similar review in 2018 with the new curriculum first rolled out in 2019.

• Interactive Tutorials