We feel this technique might be a more powerful reinforcer to performance than many pencil and paper exercises that take days or weeks to evaluate and return to students. If you have not, contact me immediately. Psychology, the study of behavior, is a discipline that traditionally utilizes both clinical and research skills. The skills used by researchers require knowledge of basic mathematics applied to a system called statistics. The sample of things constitute a subset of the population and numbers resulting from the manipulation of sample data are called statistics.
Statistics are numbers that characterize a sample.
Statistics may describe the sample. For example, we might add all the numbers in a sample and then divide by the number of numbers in the sample and call the resulting statistic the mean of the sample. Frequently, statistics calculated from samples drawn from a population are used to estimate characteristics of the population. Characteristics of a population are called parameters. Thus, the mean of a sample is a statistic and the mean of a population is called a parameter.