[R-sig-teaching] I need your thoughts on teaching with R

[Douglas Bates]

On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 7:54 PM, hadley wickham <h.wickham at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The source directory of my slides for Peter's book, "Introductory
>> Statistics with R", is available as
>>
>> http://www.stat.wisc.edu/~bates/ISwR.zip

> Those are really nice.

Thanks.  I'll get the set for the Cohen and Cohen book up after I
clear off some disk space.

> I see you still teach t-tests and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test - is
> this just an artefact of following Dalgaard, or do you have a
> preference for them over the (computational expensive but conceptually
> simpler) permutation tests?

The nonparametric tests are there because they are described in
Peter's text.  I skip them in my classes.

I tend to use t-tests after examining normal probability plots and,
possibly, considering transformation.  I believe they would be more
powerful than permutation tests but that may be incorrect.  Can you
describe situations in which you would prefer permutation tests to
t-tests?

>> (I'm sorry, Hadley, but I use lattice throughout.  I haven't taken the
>> time to learn ggplot2.)

> No problems.  I don't think there's much difference in capabilities at
> this level.