Back in 1998 students studying A-level Psychology and Biology had no ready access to software that undertook the univariate statistic calculations required for their coursework (which had to be done using a calculator), likewise their teachers did not have a quick method for checking their students' calcuations. The EasyStats Add-in for Excel was a solution.
What is the Easy Stats Add-In?
It is a collection of functions and procedures which undertake statistics calculations commonly used by A-level Psychology and Biology students. There are two parts to the EASY STATS package.
- Excel Functions to check test results and significance levels.
- Easy Checker which produces a print-out of calculations.
Easy Stats saves a great deal of time in terms of either calculating statistics or checking results. The output from Easy Checker can be imported into word-processing documents, such MS Word 95/97, enabling the production of high quality practical write-ups.
Excel Functions
Unfortunately MS Excel does not include ordinal (or ranked ) level data statistics test such as Wilcoxon Matched Pairs or the Mann-Whitney U test- Easy Stats overcomes this problem by providing the following statistics tests in the Statistics list accessible through Excel's Function Wizard.
- Chi-Squared
- Independent t-test
- Mann-Whitney U test
- Related t-test
- Sign Test
- Spearman's Rho Correlation
- Wilcoxon
Easy Stats Add-in also includes CRITICAL VALUE functions which provide the critical value for a given test at either the 5% or the 1% level when the degrees of freedom are entered along with the number of tails relating to the hypothesis.Critical Values are available for:
- Chi-Squared
- Mann-Whitney
- Spearman's Rho
- T-test
- Wilcoxon
Easy Stats Add-In includes SIGNIFICANCE LEVEL functions which return a sentence detailing the level of significance for a observed value providing the degrees of freedom (N) and number of tails is entered. This allows instant checking of the accuracy of student's significance statements.
Easy Checker
The package also includes EASY CHECKERand TEST CHECKER, both are very simple to use sets of
interactive dialog boxes that not only checks statistical test results but also produce a complete set of calculations that can be used to:
- Check errors in calculations
- Be published as an appendix in a practical write-up
TEST CHECKER involves simply selecting the appropriate test from the list shown. Also included is a CHI-SQUARED CHECKER routine.
