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

[hadley wickham]

>> 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?

The basic argument I'm most familiar with is presented in:
http://repositories.cdlib.org/uclastat/cts/tise/vol1/iss1/art1/

"My thesis is that both the content and the structure of our
introductory curriculum are shaped by old history. What we teach was
developed a little at a time, for reasons that had a lot to do with
the need to use available theory to handle problems that were
essentially computational. Almost one hundred years after Student
published his 1908 paper on the t- test, we are still using 19th
century analytical methods to solve what is essentially a technical
problem – computing a p-value or a 95% margin of error.
Intellectually, we are asking our students to do the equivalent of
working with one of those old 30-pound Burroughs electric calculators
with the rows of little wheels that clicked and spun as they churned
out sums of squares."


Hadley


-- 
http://had.co.nz/