Developing Capacity for Advanced Quantitative Methodology by Enhancing Learner Agency

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Researchers and students in Psychology often find quantitative methodology difficult -disempowering because it relies on an unfamiliar language (maths), and disjointed because it ispresented as a set of unrelated procedures. Statistics is a hurdle both during time as anundergraduate and at later stages in studies and careers.However, quantitative methods are an essential and ever-evolving part of psychology, andproviding successful learning approaches is vital for both students and researchers. The proposedproject seeks to examine the benefits that can be gained from a new approach to learningquantitative methods developed by the applicant and proposed first supervisor. This newapproach uses purpose-written simulation software, BrawStats focused on design decisions, providing instantoutcomes using a graphical interactive interface to support advanced quantitative learning.This project will investigate learner agency as the key concept to changing outcomes. The mostsuccessful learners have 'high agency': they are independent, take initiatives and make decisionsin their learning, and have a degree of self-belief in their capabilities (Mercer, 2011; PersonalizeLearning, 2015). We adopt the ecological approach to agency (Biesta and Tedder, 2007) whichemphasises the joint roles of previous experience, present environment (social and physical) andexpectations of future progress, and apply it to learning, particularly within digital environments.Since the 1980s 'e-learning' and 'educational technology' researchers and developers haveadapted constructivist and social constructivist theories to account for the ways learning occurswhen using digital technologies (Ito 2010). These accounts suggest that (well-designed) digitalenvironments and resources can provide 'authentic' virtual contexts in which learners can solveproblems and take part in practices that simulate real-world activities, particularly when thesedigital environments enable participatory collaboration around shared challenges. The design of'digital epistemic games', which mirror the tasks found in professional occupations, is a primeexample of how e-learning has been successfully applied to the development of learner agency.Context:Strong negative views and a concern about standards currently exist within Psychology andbeyond, evidenced by recent events such as the replication crisis (OSF, 2015), which reported alow replication rate of ca. 40% for psychological studies. Although it is presumed that thispercentage is due to poor scientific rigour, it is equally true that the phenomenon demonstratesthe lack of advanced skills and understanding in researchers. Further, a recent meta-analysispublicised findings that a staggering 50% of papers published over a 28-year period containedquantitative statistical inconsistencies. While there are many researchers who are confident in their abilities and believe that the replicationcrisis is not quite as disastrous as it appears, it is clear from this paper that difficulties exist that must be addressed.