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Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.
Ex: Instead of simply accepting what he heard as fact, Bobby Joe did his own research to back up what he had heard. |
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Hindsight bias is the inclination to see events that have occurred as more predictable than they in fact were before they took place.
Ex: Bobby Joe told his neighbor that he boarded up his windows because he knew the hurricane would hit hard. |
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A coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena.
Ex: Bobby Joe understood that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, though generally accepted as fact, could indeed be proven untrue one day. |
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A proposition, or set of propositions, set forth as an explanation for the occurrence of some specified group of phenomena, either asserted merely as a provisional conjecture to guide investigation.
Ex: Bobby Joe believed that his lightbulbs lasted longer when not turned on and off. |
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An operational definition defines something (e.g. a variable, term, or object) in terms of the specific process or set of validation tests used to determine its presence and quantity.
Ex: Bobby Joe decided to consider "physically in shape" as having a BMI of 12% or less. |
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The act or process of repeating, esp. for experimental purposes.
Ex: Bobby Joe flipped a penny 100 times to make sure it had a 50% chance of landing on heads. |
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A study of an individual unit, as a person, family, or social group, usually emphasizing developmental issues and relationships with the environment, esp. in order to compare a larger group to the individual unit.
Ex: Bobby Joe observed the Jones family for 6 months to see how they reacted differently when the TV was on. |
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A sampling, or partial collection, of facts, figures, or opinions taken and used to approximate or indicate what a complete collection and analysis might reveal.
Ex: Bobby Joe sent fliers to 500 houses asking for info about how often they ate out so he could compile data and make deductions. |
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The false consensus effect is a cognitive bias whereby a person tends to overestimate the degree of agreement that others have with them.
Ex: Bobby Joe protested the new health care bill, saying that nobody wanted it to be passed. |
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The total number of persons inhabiting a country, city, or any district or area.
Ex: Bobby Joe accounted as one person out of the 2 million that lived in the city of Houston |
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The process of blindly selecting a part of a population for a study on said population.
Ex: Bobby Joe and 24 other people at his school were arbitrarily given standardized tests to show the school's teaching ability. |
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The process of observing subjects in their natural habitats.
Ex: Bobby Joe observed the Jones family using tiny hidden cameras, so as not to alert them to his presence and change their behavior. |
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The mutual relation of two or more things, parts, etc.
Ex: Bobby Joe believed that their was a connection to the number of cats in his neighborhood and the number of rat infestations. |
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A type of mathematical diagram using Cartesian coordinates to display values for two variables for a set of data.
Ex: Bobby Joe plotted points of data for the neighborhood's rat and cat populations, finding an inverse trend. |
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The phenomenon of seeing the relationship one expects in a set of data even when no such relationship exists.
Ex: Bobby Joe failed a test the day the stock market crashed, so he believed that him failing his test caused the crash. |
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A test, trial, or tentative procedure; an act or operation for the purpose of discovering something unknown or of testing a principle, supposition, etc.
Ex: Bobby Joe dropped two differently weighted balls from the roof to see if they would hit the ground at different times. |
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A reaction to a placebo manifested by a lessening of symptoms or the production of anticipated side effects.
Ex: Bobby Joe unknowingly took sugar pills for his allergies, as it was a purely mental condition. |
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Of or pertaining to an experiment or clinical trial in which neither the subjects nor the researchers know which subjects are receiving the active medication, treatment, etc., and which are not: a technique for eliminating subjective bias from the test.
Ex: Bobby Joe's experiment put two groups in two rooms; one group given a placebo, the other given a drug, and the effects of both were observed, although neither group knew who had what. |
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The effect caused by giving a patient something that they are convinced will help/cure them, which makes the body in turn heal/change itself.
Ex: Bobby Joe's allergy placebos were sugar pills, but his belief that they helped cured him of his tuna allergy. |
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The part of an experiment involving a changed variable.
Ex: In Bobby Joe's experiment on bike helmet effectiveness, the experimental group had to fall with a helmet on. |
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The part of an experiment containing no changed variables.
Ex: In Bobby Joe's bike helmet effectiveness test, the control group had to fall without helmets on. |
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To arbitrarily break up the random sample into smaller groups for testing.
Ex: Bobby Joe played eenie-meenie-minie-moe to determine who would be in the experimental and control groups. |
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A variable in a functional relation whose value determines the value or values of other variables.
Ex: Bobby Joe realized that the number of cats affected the number of rats, but not vice-versa. |
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A variable in a functional relation whose value is determined by the values assumed by other variables in the relationship.
Ex: Billy Joe discovered that the rat population fluctuated according to what the cat population was at the time. |
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The value of the variate at which a relative or absolute maximum occurs in the frequency distribution of the variate.
Ex: Billy Joe found what type of lunch the average person at his school got by seeing which item sold the most |
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A quantity having a value intermediate between the values of other quantities; an average, esp. the arithmetic mean.
Ex: Billy Joe found out the average price of lunch at school by summing up the prices people payed then dividing by the number of people he asked. |
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The middle number in a given sequence of numbers, taken as the average of the two middle numbers when the sequence has an even number of numbers
Ex: Billy Joe found the average lunch people got at his school by listing their prices and finding the middle value price |
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The set of all values attained by a given function throughout its domain.
Ex: Billy Joe found that the most people payed for lunch was $12, the least was $3, with a difference of $9 |
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A measure of dispersion in a frequency distribution, equal to the square root of the mean of the squares of the deviations from the arithmetic mean of the distribution.
Ex: To find a more accurate average people payed for lunch, Billy Joe took the average of each price relative to the average price. |
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A result that is unlikely to have occured by chance.
Ex: Bobby Joe and all five of his friends scored within the general mean of 100 on their IQ tests |
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The behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a particular social, ethnic, or age group.
Ex: Bobby Joe and his family never ate pork because they are Jewish. |
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In mathematics, a variable is a value that may change within the scope of a given problem or set of operations.
Ex: Bobby Joe had some of his subjects fall off bikes with helmets when testing helmet effectiveness. |
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A value that remains unchanged, though often unknown or undetermined.
Ex: Ex: Bobby Joe had some of his subjects fall off bikes without helmets when testing helmet effectiveness. |
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People that partake willingly in a test or experiment.
Ex: Bobby Joe volunteered to test the effects of Adderall on sleep for a clinical study. |
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A group of people that accurately represent a larger population of people.
Ex: Bobby Joe and 24 of his schoolmates were selected for a study on high school behavior. |
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The group in an experiment that is subject to a variable condition.
Ex: When Bobby Joe and his classmates were tested on teenage behavior, one group of them was told to wear all black for a week. |
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The group in an experiment that does not experience any sort of change, or is given a placebo.
Ex: When Bobby Joe and his classmates were doing an experiment on teenage behavior, some were told not to change their dressing habits as the other group was doing. |
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Definition
An extraneous variable in a statistical model that correlates (positively or negatively) with both the dependent variable and the independent variable.
Ex: When Bobby Joe and his classmates were doing an experiment on teenage behavior based on dress, the data was skewed by the "black out" pep rally on Wednesday. |
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An effect that occurs when a person is more sure of their abilities than the actual extent of their abilities.
Ex: Bobby Joe thought he could unscramble three words in less than 30 seconds, but it actually took him 5 minutes. |
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| Measures of Central Tendency |
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A measure of the "middle" value of the data set.
Ex: Bobby Joe couldn't decide whether to use the mean, median, or mode to determine the average price payed for lunch at his school. |
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the phenomenon that if a variable is extreme on its first measurement, it will tend to be closer to the average on a second measurement.
Ex: Bobby Joe's test scores were 84, 87, 83, 80, and 99; he's certain his next test score will reside in the 80s. |
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Definition
A measure of the asymmetry of the probability distribution of a real-valued random variable.
Ex: When Bobby Joe collected data for the average price payed for lunch at his school, the data was messed up by a snobby rich kid that payed $500 a day for gold-plated caviar. |
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The percentage of scores in its frequency distribution that are the same or lower than it.
Ex: Bobby Joe scored higher than 78% of kids in the US on his SAT, placing him in the 78th percentile |
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| Normal Curve (Bell Curve) |
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Definition
A frequency curve that resembles the outline of a bell, as the normal curve.
Ex: After taking an IQ test and scoring a 100, Bobby Joe saw a frequency chart and realized he was at the tip, or exact middle, of the chart. |
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A subset of a population.
Ex: Bobby Joe and his 24 arbitrarily selected schoolmates were chosen as an appropriate representation of teenagers. |
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