(taught in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020, 2021 …)

Course Objectives, Learning Goals & Outcomes

The course struc­ture and teaching/learning activ­i­ties are designed around the fol­low­ing ques­tions. That is, by actively par­tic­i­pat­ing in this course, stu­dents should be able to effec­tively address the fol­low­ing ques­tions and per­form the respec­tive tasks:

1) What is sci­ence, the “sci­en­tific method” and quan­ti­ta­tive research? How do you think and argue like a good scientist?

2) Why do sci­ence? What is sci­en­tific & quan­ti­ta­tive research useful for?

• a) Why could you be excited about sci­ence? What drives and excites a researcher?
• b) What are advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages of quan­ti­ta­tive & sci­en­tific research meth­ods (as com­pared to other meth­ods)? That is, what are they appro­pri­ate and useful for?

3) What to research? Why research something?

• a) How to devise effec­tive research ques­tions and hypotheses?
• b) How to effec­tively moti­vate research questions?

4) How to use quan­ti­ta­tive & sci­en­tific meth­ods prop­erly, care­fully & effectively?

• a) Experimental design: How to design an effec­tive exper­i­ment? What does effec­tive mean?
• b) Descriptive sta­tis­tics: How to present data effec­tively? What does effec­tive mean?
• c) Inferential sta­tis­tics: What can you con­clude from quan­ti­ta­tive data? Why? What are your chances of being wrong? How do you decide which sta­tis­ti­cal meth­ods to use? How to apply them prop­erly? How to do this in a given sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis software?

5) How to com­mu­ni­cate all that effec­tively and scholarly?

6) How to crit­i­cally eval­u­ate and dis­cuss the qual­ity of quan­ti­ta­tive / sci­en­tific research (of your­self and others)?

"What's in it for me"?

Practically speak­ing, engag­ing in this course will (hope­fully) empower you to

• no longer fear sta­tis­tics (in case you ever might have ;-), but instead appre­ci­ate and enjoy the beauty and craft of rig­or­ous sci­en­tific research
• design, con­duct, ana­lyze, write up, present, and dis­cuss your own quan­ti­ta­tive (or mixed-methods) research projects
• tackle your own thesis research projects suc­cess­fully, by having the most pow­er­ful sci­en­tific research tool­box at your fingertips
• have enough skills to con­tinue learn­ing and apply­ing scientific/quantitative research meth­ods prop­erly (the goal of the course is to give you a solid basis in the basic research meth­ods and the skills to keep learn­ing and suc­cess­fully apply­ing more advanced ones)

Textbooks & tutorials

• Field, A., & Hole, G. J. (2003). How to Design and Report Experiments. Sage Publications. ISBN: 0761973834 
• TBD: Open Learning Initiative Statistics (online learn­ing mod­ules, prob­a­bly with a $25.00 fee. Registration infos will be pro­vided in class / by email) might also be: Statistical Reasoning by CMU OLI (no-login link & out­line)

Statistics and JMP resources & links to video tutorials and online courses etc.

JMP & statistics short summaries and cheat-sheets from Bernhard

(Note: these are draft and work in progress, feed­back is welcome):

• t-tests and how to per­form them in JMP
• Hypothesis test­ing for cat­e­gor­i­cal vari­ables: Analyzing cat­e­gor­i­cal or fre­quency data in JMP (Chi²)
• ANOVA assump­tions & how to test them in JMP
• How to per­form non-parametric tests in JMP
• How to cal­cu­late effect sizes in JMP
• Independent mea­sures ANOVA in JMP (incl. assump­tion test and effect sizes)
• 2×4 mixed fac­to­r­ial design in JMP — - incl. assump­tions tests, post-hocs, effect sizes, and sample writeup. 2×4 mixed fac­to­r­ial design in SPSS using the same example
• Experimental design and approaches cheat sheet from IAT802 (thanks to all the great stu­dent contributions!)
• Likert data: how to ana­lyze them (para­met­ric or non-parametric?) and plot them

Bernhard’s first attempts to do short sta­tis­tics video tuto­ri­als for SPSS & JMP

Project presentations

Latest presentations (Spring 2020)

on April 23^rd 2020, the 8 stu­dents in my grad course on “Quantitative Research Methods & Design (IAT802) pre­sented their project — due to the Covid-19 pan­demic all-virtual, here are their videos, enjoy!

• Vanessa Utz:  The Ken Burns effect for artis­tic stim­uli: How do zoom­ing and pan­ning effects impact the affec­tive aes­thetic response?
• Anjali Khurana: The study of the pref­er­ence of users for choos­ing task-based chat­bots to com­plete a task
• Morteza Malekmakan: Analyzing the Trade-off between Four Different Combinations of Selection and Navigation Methods in VR
• Amir Jahanlou: Motion Graphics in Informational Domains
• David Wong: Analyzing the impact of web usabil­ity deci­sions in online surveys
• Emma Rodrigues: A quan­ti­ta­tive approach to under­stand how age and cul­tural dif­fer­ences can play a role in defin­ing healthy aging – com­mu­nity perspectives
• Omid Gheysar: Gharamaleki Social con­tent­ed­ness and Artificial Social Agent
• Danial Kosarifar: Comparing two data visu­al­iz­ing tools’ capa­bil­ity in nar­rat­ing the story of satellites/debris orbit­ing around the earth.

Project presentations from Fall 2016 offering

On November 26^th, the 17 stu­dents in my grad course on “Quantitative Research Methods & Design (IAT802)” that I taught in Fall 2016 give their final 5:30-min project pre­sen­ta­tions in the SIAT research col­lo­quium at Simon Fraser University. Enjoy!

here’s the video record­ing of the whole ses­sion:

Here’s the list of speak­ers and topics

• Elgin McLaren:   Attention Retention: The effec­tive­ness of neu­ro­feed­back sys­tems for cueing sus­tained attention
• Jeff Ens: Music and the role of dimen­sional com­plex­ity in sim­i­lar­ity judgements
• Arron Ferguson: Choose Wrong, Someone Dies: Measuring Engagement with Ethical Choices and Character Consistency in Interactive Narrative
• Duc-Minh Pham: Body-based Navigation: A Promising Locomotion Technique in Immersive Virtual Environment.
• Ray Pan: “Split, Horizontal or Overlapped?”: Comparing Social Presence and Body Ownership in Shared Video Views for Long Distance Relationships
• Denise Quesnel:   Are you awed yet? Objective and sub­jec­tive indi­ca­tors of awe, using vir­tual real­ity content
• Mia Cole: Time to Relax: No effects to the stress response after short-term use of an EEG-based brain-computer interface.
• Maha El Meseery:   TBD (Will track­ing user inter­ac­tions during visual explo­ration helps improve their analy­sis efficiency? )
• Ted Nguyen Vo: Moving in a Box: A Visual Cue for Virtual Reality Locomotion
  Fatemeh Salehian Kia: Motive or Strategic Student: Comparing 3 Types of Visual Feedbacks on Students’ Performance with Different Learning Styles in Online Discussions
• Junwei Sun: Assessing Input Methods and Cursor Displays for 3D Positioning with HMDs
  Narges Ashtari: Exploring fac­tors which affect archi­tects design explo­ration struc­ture in CAD spaces
• Stephanie Wong: Easy A: assess­ing student’s abil­ity to cheat with smart­watch
  Abraham Hashemian: Leaning-Based 360 Locomotion Interfaces: How good are they for nav­i­ga­tion in Virtual Reality
• Serkan Pekcetin: Measuring the Effect of Binaural Audio on the Sense of Direction in Virtual Environments
• Xintian Sun: Where Was It? Evaluating Spatial Memory in Different Backgrounds from Static and Moving Viewpoints

Project presentations from Fall 2014 offering

On November 26^th 2014, the 9 stu­dents in my grad course on “Quantitative Research Methods & Design (IAT802)” that I taught in Fall 2014 gave their final 7-min project pre­sen­ta­tions in the SIAT research col­lo­quium at Simon Fraser University. Enjoy! I think the stu­dents did an amaz­ing job, quite proud of them! — for many it was their first sci­en­tific research project and presentation!

(alter­nate link)

Here’s the list of speak­ers and topics

• Alejandro:  Non-Expert Movement Observation Using Laban Movement Analysis
• Alex Kitson:  Individual fac­tors influ­enc­ing ori­en­ta­tion per­for­mance in vir­tual environments
• Jianyu Fan:  Groundtruthing and Validating the Soundscape Valence/Arousal Classification with Multiple Users
• William Li:  Validation of MotionCapture (MoCap) Labels in Movement
• Jason Procyk:  Video Feedback for Ice Hockey: Investigating the Effect on Shot Training
• Luciano Frizzera:
• Effectiveness and effi­ciency of time rep­re­sen­ta­tion on human spa­tial move­ment map visualization
• Srilekha Kirshnamachari Sridharan:  Association of Colors to Phoneme-Grapheme pairs.
• Kıvanç Tatar:  Empirical Evaluation of a Commercial Synthesizer Automatic Calibration System
• Arefin Mohiuddin:  Exploration of Parallel Alternatives in Design Tasks — The Effect on Task Completion Times

Project presentations from Fall 2013 offering

Here are the pre­sen­ters & talk titles:

Carolyn Pang    Evaluating the Usability of Desktop and Mobile Government Portals
Mirjana Prpa    Can an immer­sive dis­play enhance the expe­ri­ence of self-motion illu­sions in VR?
Sujoy Hajra    Evaluating EEG based mea­sures for lan­guage ther­apy assess­ment in stroke patients
Xiaolan Wang    Does pre­vi­ous con­tact with fund­ing orga­ni­za­tions affect the money com­mu­nity gar­dens get?
Emily C    Color’s effect on learn­ing symbol-sound rela­tion­ships
Ankit Gupta      Can seman­ti­cally labeled graphs help you find infor­ma­tion faster?
Xiao Zhang    Progressive or regres­sive visual inter­face design: com­par­ing user expe­ri­ence sup­ported by iOS 7 versus iOS 6
Ethan Soutar-Rau     It all started with a Penguin
Reese Muntean    Effects of Gender on Beer Preference
Sohail.Md    Melodic com­par­i­son in META-MELO system
Xin Tong    Comparison between two kinds of Virtual Reality dis­play: the Oculus Rift HMD & the Firsthand dis­play
Sanam Shirazi    Can we pre­dict stu­dents’ aca­d­e­mic per­for­mance from engage­ment in online learn­ing activ­i­ties?
Srecko Joksimovic The level of social pres­ence in online learn­ing com­mu­nity as a pre­dic­tor of stu­dents’ aca­d­e­mic per­for­mance
Jacqueline Jordan     Does vec­tion inten­sity differ between Virtual Reality dis­plays?

Project presentations from Fall 2012 offering

For the first time, stu­dents from the SIAT grad­u­ate course on “Quantitative Research Methods & Design (IAT802)” that I taught in Fall 2012 at SIAT gave their final 6-min project pre­sen­ta­tion pub­licly in the SIAT research col­lo­quium. Enjoy! I think the stu­dents did a won­der­ful job — for many it was their first sci­en­tific research project and presentation!

Jake Freiberg                Biomechanical Influences on Visually Induced Rotational Vection
Audrey Desjardins       Exploring Computer Mice Materials and Affective Responses
Jim Silvester                 The Effect of Viewpoint Jitter on Circular Vection in Virtual Reality
Nadya Calderon            Animation of Real-Time Series: Trends and Common Fate
Mehdi Karamnejad      The Effects of Walking on Galvonic Skin Response
Saeedeh Bayatpour      The Ability of Fusion in Three-Dimensional Autostereogram
Omid Alemi                   Are We Biased Against Computers’ Creativity?
Lisa Donaldson            The Effect of Contrast on Circular Vection When Viewed Within Virtual Reality

The last two pre­sen­ta­tions were recorded in out normal sem­i­nar room a few days later:

Jillian Warren             The Effect of Textual and Pictorial Representation on Learning Ability with Interactive Tangibles
Laura Lande              The Effects of Nursing Experience on Diagnosing Fetal Position