A consultant to assist students in solving statistics problems

The statistical consultant described in this paper incorporates a knowledge base in an educational tool for novices in statistical decision-making to use in choosing a statistical technique. The heart of the system is the rule base for differentiating between statistics. The rules are based on five questions which the data can answer, as well as the type of data, the number of variables, and any dependent/independent relationships which exist between the variables. Twenty-nine statistics and the rules for choosing them are in the rule sets. The consultant was tested against the usual textbook method with two different groups of users, 25 undergraduates and 19 doctoral students. The results were that the computer-assisted students in both samples correctly solved a larger proportion of problems despite a conservative test which favored the textbook users and also took longer to find an appropriate solution