Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Using SSD for R in the Classroom: Learning from our students

Over the past year or so, we have met almost all of you at one time or another in person so you probably know that we like to collaborate - with each other, with those interested in single-subject research, with those doing evaluations, and with our students.

During a class last week, one of Charlie's Master's students, Ezra Fromowitz, came up with a great little suggestion for SSD for R.  When you annotate a simple line graph using the ABstat function, which produces mean, median, and standard deviation lines, why not provide the value for the requested statistic in the Console?  This would make it much easier to further annotate the graph with useful information using the ABtext function.

Here's what Ezra meant:

Let's say we had created the line graph below depicting Jenny's crying episodes during class.  We created the line graph using the ABplot function, added the phase line using the ABlines function, and then labeled the phases using the ABtext function.



Perhaps, however, we would want to add a mean line for the phases.  We could add this by using the ABstat function.  The output in the Console now tells us that the mean for the baseline is 4.615 and the mean for the intervention is 1.591.  We can further annotate our graph to provide some really helpful output:



What an excellent suggestion, Ezra!  

Ezra's suggestion was so helpful that we have now added it to the SSD for R package, so be sure to install the latest version by selecting "Check for Updates" in the Packages pane of RStudio!

If you have any suggestions for making SSD for R better or more useful for you, feel free to email us. And, as always, check out our website because we are updating it frequently these days!






Monday, February 10, 2014

Getting ready for the book!

We are getting ready for the release of SSD for R:  An R Package for Analyzing Single-Subject Research.  We are really excited because we've had some fabulous conversations with folks at all the conferences we've been to this year, and we think this book will be really helpful in advancing single-subject research.

In any event, we have updated our website to make it more useful for book purchasers. In the book (and many of our students have read our manuscript) we have lots of examples using sample data, so we have added a tab to our website called "Datasets." 

Feel free to download the files when you get your book so you can step through each of the examples.

Also, if there is something you would like to see on our website, let us know by emailing us.

Charlie and Wendy