ABSTRACT
Everybody who teaches statistics and experimental psychology courses faces students who are either overcome with anxiety (“I’ve never been good in math”) or terminally bored with the apparent lack of relevance of the course to their lives. Many students are bound to fall into one or both of these categories, given the large numbers of undergraduate psychology departments that require or recommend a course in statistics. From 147 college and university catalogs sampled by Bartz (1981), all but 12 either required or recommended a statistics course. Further, informing students that even graduate programs in clinical psychology require statistics and experimental courses is not highly motivating. The continuing battle to make the courses more palatable to undergraduates is reflected in the efforts by psychologists to alter and update their statistics/experimental courses. To this end, Teaching of Psychology has published regular articles dealing with these areas (e.g., Bartz, 1981; Dillbeck, 1983; Hastings, 1982).
