Oops

I guess everyone has off days, right?  Tonight I did something I've never done before - I introduced my undergraduate stat class to SPSS for Windows, a stat package.  I had my overheads and I had my sample data file and I had everything planned out.

Then I went off-script.  I was showing them outliers in the data set, and decided that I should show them how to filter out the outliers.

So these poor undergrads, who'd never opened SPSS before, sat there slack-jawed as I went through the combination of compute statements and recodes needed to create a variable that you could then use "select cases" to filter out all the people you'd flagged as undesirable.

My brain isn't linear when I'm using SPSS.  It's constantly problem-solving and anticipating what I have to do to the data next.  That doesn't work well when you're introducing people to it.

Keep it simple, guy.

Here's the program.
Here's how you run Descriptives.
Here's how you create a variable.
Here's how you run a t-test.
Done.

Sigh.
 

Comments

[Sjen]

Those poor undergrads!