Statistics education in undergraduate psychology: A survey of UK course content
Widely-used statistical practices may undermine the quality of scientific research. Several proposals have been made for how to improve these practices—with effective statistical education of developing researchers being one. With this in mind, we sought to document the statistical content currently taught in undergraduate psychology courses in the UK. We found that 21% of universities had publicly available course syllabi describing the statistical content taught in their psychology course. Of the course syllabi we obtained, most of them mentioned specific tests (ANOVAs, regression, correlation, t-tests, frequency tests, and rank tests) and about half mentioned probability and randomness, effect size, and statistical power, but few mentioned concepts such as confidence intervals, multiple comparisons, meta-analysis, replication, Bayesian statistics, frequentist statistics, and practical significance. These findings suggest that undergraduate psychology courses may not emphasize key statistical concepts relevant to producing robust and reproducible research.