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A Simple Introduction to Tests of Significance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2016

J. K. Backhouse
J. K. Backhouse*
Affiliation:
Department of Educational Studies, University of Oxford
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Extract

A few years ago, an experiment was made at Marlborough (1) to begin the teaching of statistics with a discussion of rank correlation because “within a few periods and without any complicated arithmetic, it was possible to discuss the main items in a statistician’s philosophy”. What I want to do in this article is to show how the same can be done with one of the commonest situations in elementary statistics, when we wish to compare populations from which two samples are drawn and decide whether one is “better” than the other. In the classical approach, this is often done by Student’s t test which is highly sophisticated compared with the Mann-Whitney U test, to which I now turn.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Mathematical Gazette , Volume 55 , Issue 391 , February 1971 , pp. 1 - 4
Copyright
Copyright © Mathematical Association 1971

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References

1. Goldsmith, C.C. “Numeracy periods for the classical side, Marlborough College.” The Mathematical Association, Experiments in the teaching of sixth form mathematics to non-specialists. Pamphlet No.2. (Bell, 1967).Google Scholar
2. Siegel, S. Nonparametric statistics for the behavioural sciences. (McGraw-Hill, 1956).Google Scholar