Using SSD for R in the Classroom: Funny anecdotes

So, two amusing things happened this week that we thought we'd share with you before going into the details of how the class went this week.

The first includes a shout-out to one of our most excellent (and creative) students, Arthur Zaczkiewicz, who, besides getting up at 4 am to attend classes in NYC, has decided to entertain and inspire his classmates as they were working on their midterm papers with this:

Brilliant, Arthur, brilliant!

Second amusing story:  As you know, our students have been busily working on their mid-term papers so they have obviously been talking about their projects in the hallways.  One of our students from LAST semester came up to me and said, "I heard your students talking about SSD for R in the hall.  I liked this research class so much that I actually felt nostalgic!"

Well, we don't really hear the words "research" and "nostalgic" in the same sentence, so we really enjoyed our student relating her experience back to us!

And now for our class progress.....

This was a short week for us due to the July 4th holiday.  This week we began talking about visual comparisons between baseline and intervention phases and introduced the students to the binomial function in SSD for R so they can compare what would be considered success in the baseline  and compare it to what would be considered success in the intervention.  To do this, we showed them standard deviation band graphs that extend the standard deviation bands from the baseline through the intervention.  Then we discussed the desired direction of change and how we could consider that data points outside of these bands would be considered "successful" if they were in the desired direction.  Then, using the ABbinomial function, the students could enter the number of successes they observed in both the baseline and intervention to figure out if there were statistically significant differences between the phases.

We thought this was a great way to start our analysis since a) it is visually based, and b) most people readily understand the notion of increasing or decreasing proportions of success across phases.

Next up.... SPC charts.  We offered the students some GREAT beach reading - Orme and Cox's excellent 2001 article entitled, "Analyzing single-subject design data using statistical process control charts."  We wonder how many enthusiastic students will be reading THAT on the beach this holiday weekend!