Back to the blogs!

Hi, everyone!

Today, our agenda will go something like this:

• I'll take attendance and point out this blog entry for tonight's class.
• I'm going to return any graded material I still have.
• Then I'll collect the Annotated Bibliographies. Yes, they are due tonight.
• At about 6:20 or so, Dr. John Cussen will be appearing in class to conduct student evaluations of me. I will leave the room then and go out in the hall to wait. It usually takes about 15 or 20 minutes. Meanwhile, if you finish before I get back, please get into your blog and answer today's blog question (I will also have you write something at the end of class, as well, on the blog, but first I want to know some things from you.
• Here are the questions:
• What do you know about statistics? Have you ever taken a stats course, and if so, did you do okay in it? If not, you should still answer this last part. I'm going to have a list of statistical terms, symbols, or letters, and I want you to identify which ones, if any, that you know what they mean:     (just for the record: you will not be tested on these or anything...)
• intrinsic motivation
• habitual multitasking
• SD
• mean
• demographic data
• Likert scale
• PCA
• eigenvalue
• variance
• internal consistency
• validity
• construct validity
• multivariant analysis of variance (MANOVA)
• Pillai's F
• p
• ANOVA
• n
• Chronbach's alpha
• zero-order
• Spearman's rho
• parametric regression analysis
• multiple regression analysis
• Pearson correlations
• causality
• correlation
• If any of these terms ring a bell, tell what you think it is. No fair looking on the Internet, though.
• After you've had sufficient time to write this blog entry, I will ask you to take out your "Tissue Paper Bike" exercise and start or continue to work on that. I will circulate around the room helping everyone and checking when you are done, if you finish during this class period.
• Towards the end of class I will give each person a little booklet that shows how you're doing so far.
• Before leaving class, you should also print out and (get a head start on) read (-ing) the article on Docutek called "Electronic Media Use, Reading, and Academic Distractability in College Youth."
• Your assignment:
• Read this article thoroughly and underline or highlight ANY words you do now know.
• Try to sum up this article in your own words in one or two sentences.
• Write the citation for this in both MLA style and APA style. It was an online article taken directly from the scholarly journal's web site, last week.
• Bring your sources notebook to class, along with any questions or difficulties you are having thought out to discuss with me.
• Write a blog entry entitled "My Progress So Far with My Paper" and reflect on where you are in the research project and what is giving you the most trouble.