The Criticism of Inferential Statistics

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Abstract
I am aware that the general reader will usually pass by any article which has the word ‘statistics’ in its title. My main preoccupation, therefore, has been to try to make this short review as appealing as possible to the classroom teacher, the administrator, and the politician, and to hope that it may perhaps have some influence on their educational decisions. The conclusion is that the education service should downgrade in importance those research conclusions which lean heavily upon inferential statistics for their authority, on the grounds that there have been many warnings published concerning the damage that inferential statistics can do, or have already done, to the progress of the social sciences. In a brief postscript to this, evidence is offered of the increasing use of these same techniques in educational research.

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