What is a confidence interval? According to the reading material assigned in the course, it is a range (top and bottom) value to the set of numbers to address the mean of the population giving the researcher an idea of the probability or level of confidence (Warner, 2013).

Response Guidelines

Provide a substantive contribution that advances the discussion in a meaningful way by identifying strengths of the posting, challenging assumptions, and asking clarifying questions. Your response is expected to reference the assigned readings, as well as other theoretical, empirical, or professional literature to support your views and writings. Reference your sources using standard APA guidelines. Review the Participation Guidelines section of the Discussion Participation Scoring Guide to gain an understanding of what is required in a substantive response.

Discussion Response Peer1 (Teddrick)

What is a confidence interval? According to the reading material assigned in the course, it is a range (top and bottom) value to the set of numbers to address the mean of the population giving the researcher an idea of the probability or level of confidence (Warner, 2013). Upon more research regarding this, I was better to understand that a confidence interval is basically to estimate the mean of a population. The confidence interval focuses on this by providing the range of values, scores or numbers that may be contained in the population of interest (Horrell, Michelson, McCormack, & Prins, 2012).What I am putting together with this is that if we have a group of grades from an entire school district, the confidence interval is going to be a pool of those grades to give us the mean for the students in that school district. This would be a level of confidence for the research to say that the sample pulled from the entire population would represent the entire pool on the graph created showing those numbers or scores.Why does the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association strongly recommend the inclusion of CI’s in study results? It is strongly suggested to include CI’s in study results and reporting so that there is enough information for whom ever is reading to be able to understand what they are reading. The reader should be able to recognize and understand the basics of the analyses, come up with some estimates and summaries from the information that is provided. It was also suggested that when a study includes the use of graphs or table that includes a reference of a mean or slopes, which it does need to include the confidence interval (Association, 2010). It really seems that they important factor with including the confidence intervals in any report is because it is a really good way to get across the results of a study in a visual manner, due to showing the effect and size of the study, showing where the mean of the sample is, and if that sample is skewed or is “normal” by the shape of the slopes (Association, 2010).

ReferencesAssociation, A. P. (2010). Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Horrell, K., Michelson, D., McCormack, D., & Prins, J. (2012, April). NIST/SEMATECH e-Handbook of Statistical Methods. Retrieved from http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/

Warner, R. M. (2013). Applied Statistics: From Bivariate Through Multivariate Techniques (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Discussion Response Peer2 (Cait)

Confidence intervals (CI) are used to derive or estimate information given from a sample (Warner, 2013). Additionally, CI’s are also utilized to find the mean or values of samples (Warner, 2013). In many instances, CI’s can be used to estimate a population mean, probability and will determine the lower and upper limit (mean) of values from samples and/or data (Warner, 2013). While CI’s are completely appropriate to use when finding the sample mean, the value of a population or Pearsons r, it is important to remember that CI’s should not be used to generalize an entire population (Warner, 2013).

In the article, The Use of Confidence Intervals as a Meta-Analytic Lens to Summarize the Effects of Teacher Education Technology Courses on Preservice Teacher TPACK, the researchers used CI’s to find the mean of teaching technology (TKTT) in a University classroom (Young, Young & Hamilton, 2013). Specifically, Young et al., (2013) used CI’s to summarize their quantitative TPAK data to determine the value of the samples and find the mean of the scores. Using CI’s in this article, provided an excellent example of why researchers would use CI’s in statistical analysis. In short, the main goal of using CI’s in this type of study would be to create data that could determine the means of achievement, summarize the data (based on the samples) and estimate the means of the sample population (Young et al., 2013).

CI’s were said to be extremely useful in Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. The APA manual stated that CI’s should be used to determine major outcomes in statistics (Warner, 2013). By using CI’s, the APA manual believes that researchers will be able to obtain many sample statistics and effect sizes (Warner, 2013). Additionally, it was also stated that CI’s should be used for sample means (Warner, 2013). However, while CI’s can be incredibly beneficial, it is important to remember that they should never be used to make inferences about the general population as a whole, as that data would be too generalized and not entirely accurate (Warner, 2013).

Reference

Warner, R. M. (2013). Applied Statistics From Bivariate Through Multivariate Techniques (2nd ed.). Thousand Oakes, CA: SAGE Publications.

Young, J. R., Young, J. L., & Hamilton, C. (2013). The Use of Confidence Intervals as a Meta-Analytic Lens to Summarize the Effects of Teacher Education Technology Courses on Preservice Teacher TPACK. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 46(2), 149-172.