The Evolutionary Approach - holiday work for Mr Lawrence

Answer the following questions, either in the form of a single essay, short answers or a presentation, in time for our first lesson in September.

• What are the assumptions made by the evolutionary approach to psychology?
• What did Clark and Hatfield (1989) find out about casual sex?
• How does the evolutionary approach explain these findings?
• Why is the approach so controversial?

Statistics - The Third Kind of Lie

On Thursday we will have a Unit 4 Exam-style test on the statistics work we have been doing this term. Here is what you need to be able to do:

• How to tell if data is ordinal or nominal.
• What means, medians, modes, ranges and standard deviations are and what they show.
• What independent groups, repeated measures and matched pairs designs are.
• How to choose and justify the choice of a statistical test for a set of data.
• What a level of significance is and how to justify a choice of the 5% level.
• How to decide whether a result is significant using a statistical table.
• How to state the result of a statistical test.

Here is the flow-chart for choosing a statistical test - stating the decisions you make when working through this is what 'justifying your choice of test' means.

Here are the instructions for the write-up of the 'finger-tapping' experiment we did, and here is the data. I want to take this work in on Thursday.

More practice statistics problems:
Four more tests to do.
Significant or not significant?