I don't understand what my first assignment is meant to be about. Or whether it is an essay or a report. I have to define psychometric terms and conduct multiple data analyses. Stats again, blech.
What kinds of tests/what kind of analyses?
It is to do with aspects of psychological assessments. Have to interpret scale data using descriptives, norms, reliability, validity, discrimination and difficulty using PASW (SPSS). I don't know how I am going to make this into a 3000 word assignment. The instructions for it seem really vague.
Ah, SPSS. Kind of a fun program to play with. Some of it, I assume, is knowing how to match the type of data and research question to the correct kind of test? I remember making it spit out descriptives, but as far as the rest, I can see how you'd use it to give you data you could make inferences from, but there isn't, for example, a direct test for validity IIRC (I don't think a computer can
do that... if it can, I think it would have to be with a much more complex program than SPSS). Is "difficulty" being used in a specialized, science-y way, or does it just mean "difficulty?"
Also, are you supposed to have some kind of lit review in there, if it's supposed to be 3,000 words? The way we were taught to write up interpretations of the data was very specific (pretty much different form responses you'd fill in the blanks of with your data and variable names) and not exactly wordy.