School of Psychological Science

		Professor Geoff Cumming Emeritus Professor		Phone: +61 3 9479 2820 Fax: +61 3 9479 1956 g.cumming@latrobe.edu.au Room 461 George Singer Building
		B Sc, Dip Ed (Monash), DPhil (Oxford), MAPS, MACCE

I retired in January 2008, mainly so I can spend more time on research, and can develop and publish ESCI. Also, I am now looking out for possible short- or medium-length visits to interesting labs in interesting places. (I can offer various statistics workshops, as given for example at recent APA Conventions.)

My main current research is in the area of statistical cognition. ESCI is my interactive graphical software that runs under Microsoft Excel, and which is intended to support better understanding of sampling, confidence intervals, meta-analysis and other statistical techniques and their use by researchers and students. I am especially interested in replication.

With colleagues and students I have been investigating how confidence intervals and other statistical techniques have been used in journals, and how researchers in several disciplines think about statistical inference. I am also interested in Bayesian approaches. Our aim is to promote statistics reform in psychology. Recent Publications

I am a member of the Complex Decision Research Group, which is a collaboration between La Trobe University and the University of Melbourne, and a participant, with La Trobe colleague Mary Omodei, in the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre. I am particularly involved in studying safety and decision making on the fireground.

I am also interested in cognition more generally, and in usability and Human-Computer Interaction. I have a student working on incubation in problem solving.

My background: My first degree was in mathematical statistics at Monash, then on a Rhodes Scholarship I worked with Anne Treisman at Oxford for a DPhil in experimental psychology. I have been at La Trobe since 1974. Study leave visits for collaborative research have been to Northeastern University (Boston), Edinburgh University and Lancaster University. I was Chairperson of the Department of Psychology during 1989-1993. In 2002-2003 I travelled and made many academic visits, mainly in the U.S.

I am married to Lindsay, have three children—now grown up and scattered around the world—live in an old weatherboard house in Rosanna, ride a bike and enjoy woodworking and word games.

My past research: I worked on Computer tools for enhancing critical thinking, with Tim van Gelder. We studied argument mapping, and Tim’s wonderful Reason!Able software for critical thinking. This has proved very effective in university and school classrooms as the basis for effective enhancement of critical thinking. In an ARC-funded project we evaluated the software and Tim’s related educational materials. We found evidence that a one semester critical thinking course, based on Reason!Able, gives a very substantial increase—considerably greater than reported in previous evaluations of critical thinking courses—in performance on standardised tests.

Tim’s software has been further developed by his company Austhink Software, and is now available commercially as Rationale and bCisive: both are fabulous! http://www.austhink.org/ http://bcisive.austhink.com/

I also worked on decision making in conservation biology, with Mark Burgman of the Australian Centre of Excellence for Risk Analysis (ACERA). With ARC support, we investigated data presentation and environmental decision making, with particular interest in statistical power and confidence intervals.

I have also worked in a range of multidisciplinary areas and published jointly with colleagues in artificial intelligence, computer science, conservation biology, education, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, and statistics. I helped set up La Trobe’s double degree in Cognitive Science and Computer Science. My main research interests have been the use of computers to enhance learning, and the learning and understanding of statistics. I have worked with children learning to read, and with secondary school students using logic programming. Then came work in the field of AIED (Artificial Intelligence in Education), including the MAYDAY project, which studied the expertise of expert human teachers.

The StatPlay project, with Neil Thomason and others, developed interactive multimedia for understanding some fundamental statistical concepts, but did not achieve commercialisation.

Recent Publications

Memberships and Associations

Member, Australian Psychological Society
International affiliate, American Psychological Association
Member, Association for Psychological Science
Member, Australian Council for Computers in Education
Member, Australian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary
Education
Member, International Association for Statistics Education

Recent Publications

Beyth-Marom, R., Fidler, F., & Cumming, G. (in press). Statistical cognition: Towards evidence-based practice in statistics and statistics education. Statistics Education Research Journal.

Cumming, G. (in press). p values versus confidence intervals as warrants for conclusions that results will replicate. In B. Thompson & R. Subotnik (Eds.) Research methodologies for conducting research on giftedness. Washington, DC: APA Books. (abstract)

Cumming, G., & Fidler, F. (in press). The new stats: Effect sizes and confidence intervals. In G. R. Hancock & R. O. Mueller (Eds.) Quantitative methods in the social and behavioral sciences: A guide for researchers and reviewers. Erlbaum.

Kalinowski, P., Fidler, F., & Cumming, G. (in press). Overcoming the inverse probability fallacy: A comparison of two teaching interventions. Methodology.

Velicer, W. F., Cumming, G., Fava, J. L., Rossi, J. S., Prochaska, J. O., & Johnson, J. (2008). Theory testing using quantitative predictions of effect size. Applied Psychology: An International Review, 57, 589-608.

Cumming, G. (2008). Replication and p intervals: p values predict the future only vaguely, but confidence intervals do much better. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3, 286-300. [download article pdf]*

Faulkner, C., Fidler, F., & Cumming, G. (2008). The value of RCT evidence depends on the quality of statistical analysis. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 46, 270-281. [download article pdf]

Fidler, F., & Cumming, G. (2008). The new stats: Attitudes for the twenty-first century. (Ch 1) In J.W. Osborne (Ed.). Best practice in quantitative methods (pp. 1-12). Sage.

Fidler, F., Faulkner, S., & Cumming, G. (2008). Analyzing and presenting outcomes: Focus on effect size estimates and confidence intervals. In A. M. Nezu & C. M. Nezu (Eds.) Evidence-based outcome research: A practical guide to conducting randomized controlled trials for psychosocial interventions (pp. 315-334). New York: OUP.

Cumming, G. (2007). Confidence intervals. In G. Ritzer (Ed.) The Blackwell encyclopedia of sociology (vol. II, pp. 656-659). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Cumming, G. (2007). Inference by eye: Pictures of confidence intervals and thinking about levels of confidence. Teaching Statistics, 29, 89-93. [download article pdf]*

Cumming, G., Fidler, F., Leonard, M., Kalinowski, P., Christiansen, A., Kleinig, A., Lo, J., McMenamin, N., & Wilson, S. (2007) Statistical reform in psychology: Is anything changing? Psychological Science,18, 230-232. [download article pdf]

Cumming, G., Fidler, F., & Vaux, D. L. (2007). Error bars in experimental biology. Journal of Cell Biology, 177, 7-11. [link to article]

Cumming, G., & Maillardet, R. (2006). Confidence intervals and replication: Where will the next mean fall? Psychological Methods, 11, 217-227. [download article pdf]

Fidler, F. & Cumming, G. (2007). Lessons learned from statistical reform efforts in other disciplines. Psychology in the Schools. [download article pdf]

Fidler, F., Burgman, M., Cumming, G., Buttrose, R. & Thomason, N. (2006). Impact of criticisms of hypothesis significance testing on statistical reporting practices in conservation biology. Conservation Biology,20, 1539-1544. [download article pdf]

Belia, S., Fidler, F., Williams, J., & Cumming, G. (2005). Researchers misunderstand confidence intervals and standard error bars. Psychological Methods, 10, 389-396. [download article pdf]*

Cumming, G. (2005). Understanding the average probability of replication. Comment on Killeen (2005). Psychological Science, 16. 1002-1004. [download article pdf]

Di Stefano, J., Fidler, F., & Cumming, G. (2005). Effect size estimates and confidence intervals: An alternative focus for the presentation and interpretation of ecological data. In A. R. Burk (Ed.) New trends in ecology research (pp. 71-102). New York: Nova Science Publishers. [download article pdf]

Fidler, F., Cumming, G., Thomason, N., Pannuzzo, D., Smith, J., Fyffe, P., Edmonds, H., Harrington, C., & Schmitt, R. (2005). Evaluating the effectiveness of editorial policy to improve statistical practice: The case of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. 73, 136-143. [download article pdf]

Fidler, F., Thomason, N., Cumming, G., Finch, S., & Leeman, J. (2005). Confidence intervals, still much to learn: Reply to Rouder & Morey. Psychological Science, 16, 494-495. [download article pdf]

Cumming, G., & Finch, S. (2005). Inference by eye: Confidence intervals, and how to read pictures of data. American Psychologist, 60, 170–180. [download article pdf 144k]*

Cumming, G. (2005). Megabytes and colour, but learning is still the issue. Australian Educational Computing, 20(1), 14-17. [download article pdf]

Fidler, F., Cumming, G., Thomason, N. & Burgman, M. (2004). Statistical reform in medicine, psychology and ecology. Journal of Socio-Economics, 33, 615-630. [download article pdf]

Cumming, G., Williams, J., & Fidler, F. (2004). Replication, and researchers’ understanding of confidence intervals and standard error bars. Understanding Statistics, 3, 299-311. [download article pdf 412k]*

Finch, S., Cumming, G., Williams, J., Palmer, L., Griffith, E., Alders, C., Anderson, J., & Goodman, O. (2004). Reform of statistical inference in psychology: The case of Memory & Cognition. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments & Computers, 36, 312-324. [download article pdf]

Fidler, F., Thomason, N., Cumming, G., Finch, S., & Leeman, J. (2004). Editors can lead researchers to confidence intervals, but can’t make them think: Statistical reform lessons from medicine. Psychological Science, 15, 119-126. [download article pdf]

Van Gelder, T., Bissett, M., & Cumming, G. (2004). Cultivating expertise in informal reasoning. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58, 142-152. (abstract)

Wolfe, R., & Cumming, G. (2004). Communicating the uncertainty in research findings: Confidence intervals. Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 7, 138-143. (Subject of invited editorial: Marshall, S. (2004). Testing with confidence: The use (and misuse) of confidence intervals in biomedical research. Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 7, 135-137.) (abstract )*

Finch, S., Thomason, N., & Cumming, G. (2002). Past and future American Psychological Association guidelines for statistical practice. Theory & Psychology, 12, 825-853. [download article pdf]

Cumming, G. (2001). ESCI. Exploratory Software for Confidence Intervals.

Cumming, G. (2001). Project Design and achieving educational change: From StatPlay to ESCI. In G. Kennedy, M. Keppell, C. McNaught & T. Petrovic (Eds.), Meeting at the Crossroads. Proceedings of the 18th Annual Conference of the Australian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education. (pp. 151-160). Melbourne: Biomedical Multimedia Unit, The University of Melbourne. http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/melbourne01/pdf/papers/cummingg.pdf

Cumming, G., & Finch, S. (2001). A primer on the understanding, use and calculation of confidence intervals based on central and noncentral distributions. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 61, 530-572. [download article pdf]

Finch, S., Cumming, G., & Thomason, N. (2001). Reporting of statistical inference in the Journal of Applied Psychology: Little evidence of reform. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 61, 181-210. [download article pdf]

Cumming, G., & McDougall, A. (2000). Mainstreaming AIED into Education? International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 11, 197-207. [download article pdf]

* There is an ESCI module available for free download, to accompany this article.