| Abstract: | Comments on the report of the Estes Park Seminar on Education for Research in Psychology (Amer. Psychologist, 1959, 14, 167-179). The seminar apparently advocates the doctrine of the golden mean: theory, breadth of scholarship, statistics, etc. are not bad, are indeed necessary; but there is a serious danger that they may be carried to excess. This is no doubt true; but the warning is anchored neither by specific recommendations, nor by any relevant data, nor even anything more than a lip service suggestion that it would be useful to investigate curriculum problems in an objective way. There is thus a serious danger that the seminar's report will be all things to all men and that energy which could be spent in such investigation will be dissipated in arguing out compromises of opinions based on insufficient data. It is the purpose of this note to present evidence on one aspect of the problem: that of statistics training. Psychology will be fortunate if the members of the seminar set their manifold talents to bringing the greater problems of graduate instruction out of the domain of personal-impression correlations and into the light of objective and of experimental evidence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
