PSYCHOLOGY STUDENTS' UNDERSTANDING OF ELEMENTARY BAYESIAN INFERENCE

摘要

We explore the possibility of introducing basic ideas of Bayesian inference to undergraduate psychology students and report on the outcomes of our training. We present empirical results on how 78 psychology students learned the basics of Bayesian inference after a 12 hour teaching experience, which included Bayes' theorem, inference on proportions (discrete and continuous case) and means. Learning was assessed through a questionnaire that included multiple choice items and open-ended problems that were solved with the help of computers. In this paper we report part of our results, that show that a majority of students reached good intuitive understanding of most teaching goals, even with a limited time of teaching. We also remark that the main problems detected do not directly relate to Bayesian inference. Difficulties in distinguishing a conditional probability and its inverse that have been repeatedly pointed out in the literature arose in our students and had an influence in general performance.