Advanced Statistics in Education and Psychology

PREFACE

Education and psychology are the main disciplines of behavioural science division of human knowledge. Science is collection of obser- vations and experiences about certain behaviours intends to understand and communicate precisely and objectively through the process of Statistics and measurement. Mathematics and statistics are the universal languages which are easily and powerfully utilized by any science, its terminology is very wide in numerals but well defined. The verbal languages communicate approximately but not objectively and the arcas are limited. The process of measurement assign the numerals to the traits, variables, characteristics or a phenomenon accurately and ob- jectively. It is transformed by mathematics or statistics easily in thoughts. The statistics is a useful means to obtain precision and objectivity in the formulations.

Statistics has focus to make observations or data meaningful and to draw inferences on the basis sample indices. The process of measurement provides raw data which are meaningless and statistical analysis make these data meaningful. The data indicate about the sampling distribution. The sampling is an economical device to make the research work feasible and more functional, because it is difficult or some tire impossible to measure population. The population parameters are estimated by sample statistics. This process is known as statistical inferences. This type of statistical analysis is termed as parametric statistics. Such statistical techniques make assumptions about the parameters. Recently new statistical techniques have been developed which are known ‘distribution free’ or non-parametric statistics. It has no assumption about the shape of population, therefore it is also called ranking tests’ or ‘order tests’. Both types of statistical techniques. Parametric and non-parametric statistics have been discussed in this book.

The main objective of this book is to introduce statistical concepts and applications of staistics in the research studies to the students of education and psychology.