School of Psychological Science

		Dr Fiona Fidler ARC Postdoctoral Fellow		Phone: +61 3 9479 2938 Fax: +61 3 9479 1956 f.fidler@latrobe.edu.au f.fidler@unimelb.edu.au Room 456 George Singer Building
		BPsych (Hons), PhD (History and Philosophy of Science, University of Melbourne)

I am interested in the history and philosophy of science, statistical cognition and judgment and decision making.

Two specific research programs are outlined below.

Statistical Cognition

Our projects in statistical cognition involve identifying typical misconceptions about statistical concepts and developing graphical displays and language for improved statistical communication. These projects are strongly connected to the statistical reform of ecology, psychology and other disciplines (by statistical reform we mean the move away from over-reliance on statistical significance testing, dichotomous decisions made on the basis of p values to effect size estimation, confidence intervals, Bayesian techniques and other methods).

My PhD thesis was about resistance to statistical reform in psychology, medicine and ecology. A pdf (1.4MB) is available here:

Fidler, F. (2005). From Statistical Significance to Effect Estimation: Statistical Reform in Psychology, Medicine and Ecology. Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Melbourne.

On statistical cognition projects I have worked primarily with these people:

Prof. Mark Burgman, School of Botany, University of Melbourne

Prof. Geoff Cumming, School of Psychological Science, La Trobe University

Dr Neil Thomason, Department of Philosophy, University of Melbourne

Dr Sue Finch, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne

Our current project in this area is:

Evidence based improvement of statistical inference practices in psychology and other disciplines.

• Cumming, G. and Fidler, F. Funding: 2007-2010, $355, 852. ARC Discovery Grant and Australian Post-doctoral Fellowship. (School of Psychological Science, La Trobe University)
• We currently have 2 PhD students working in this area: Pawel Kalinowski and Jerry Lai.

Interval Judgement

Overconfidence in interval judgments is a common phenomenon. In experts the phenomenon is even more pronounced: their estimates are systematically too narrow. For example, when asked to guess a 90% interval for some value, experts usually provide bounds that correspond with 50% intervals. In other words, they severely underestimate their own uncertainty. My research looks for ways of eliciting interval judgments that have less systematic narrowing, and so provide estimates that more accurately characterise uncertainty. This research forms part of a broader project called 'eliciting expert opinion'. The expert elicitation project began in January 2007 and is an Australian Centre for Excellence in Risk Analysis (ACERA) project. Others working on this broader project include: Mark Burgman, Terry Walshe, Marrisa McBride and Bonnie Wintle.

I will be on maternity leave from March to December 2009

	Publications		PhD Thesis [pdf 1.4MB]
	Book Chapters
	Grants		Supervision

Memberships
Member, Association of Psychological Science (APS)
Member, American Psychological Association (APA)
Member, Society for Judgment and Decision Making (JDM)

Publications

Journal Articles

Lai, J., Fidler, F. & Cumming, G. (in review). Subjective p intervals: Researchers underestimate the variability of p values over replication.

Speirs-Bridge, A., Fidler, F., McBride, M., Flander, L., Cumming, G. and Burgman, M. (in review). Reducing overconfidence in the interval judgements of experts. Risk Analysis.

Fidler, F. & Loftus, G. (in press, invited). Why figures with error bars should replace p values: Some conceptual arguments and empirical demonstrations. Zeitschrift fuer Psychologie / Journal of Psychology.

Cumming, G. & Fidler, F. (in press, invited). Confidence Intervals: Better Answers to Better Questions. Zeitschrift fuer Psychologie / Journal of Psychology.

Beyth-Marom, R., Fidler, F. & Cumming, G. (2008). Statistical Cognition: Towards Evidence-Based Practice in Statistics and Statistics Education. Statistics Education Research Journal.

Kalinowski, P., Fidler, F. & Cumming, G. (2008). Overcoming the inverse probability fallacy: A comparison of two teaching interventions. Methodology, 4, 152-158.

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.

Walshe, T., Wintle, B., Fidler, F. & Burgman, M. (2007). Use of confidence intervals to demonstrate performance against forest management standards. Forest Ecology and Management, 247, 237-245.

Wintle, B., Burgman, M. & Fidler, F. (2007). How fast should nanotechnology advance? Nature Nanotechnology, 2, 327.

Cumming, G., Fidler, F., & Vaux, D. L. (2007). Error bars in experimental biology. Journal of Cell Biology, 177, 7-11. [Feature article] [Reprinted in Journal of Experimental Medicine, April 2007, 204, i11.]

Fidler, F. and Cumming, G. (2007). Lessons learned from statistical reform efforts in other disciplines. Special Issue: Statistical reform in school psychology (Thomas J. Kehle and Melissa A. Bray, Eds.) Psychology in the Schools, 44, 441-449.

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

Fidler, F., Burgman, M., Cumming, G. Buttrose, R. and Thomason., N. (2006). Impact of criticism of null hypothesis significance testing on statistical reporting practices in conservation biology. Conservation Biology, 20, 1539-1544.

Belia, S., Fidler, F., Williams, J. and Cumming, G. (2005). Researchers misunderstand confidence intervals and standard error bars. Psychological Methods, 10, 389-396.

Fidler, F., Thomason, N., Cumming, G., Finch, S. and Leeman, J. (2005). Still much to learn about confidence intervals. Reply to Rouder and Morey. Psychological Science, 16, 494-495.

Fidler, F., Cumming, G., Thomason, N., Pannuzzo, D., Smith, J., Fyffe, P., Edmonds, H., Harrington, C. and Schmitt, R. (2005). Toward improved statistical reporting in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 73, 136-143.

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

Fidler, F., Thomason, N., Cumming, G., Finch, S. and Leeman, J. (2004). Editors can lead researchers to confidence intervals but they can't make them think: Statistical reform lessons from Medicine. Psychological Science, 15, 119-126.

Cumming, G., Williams, J., and Fidler, F. (2004). Replication, and researchers’ understanding of confidence intervals and standard error bars. Understanding Statistics, 3, 299-311.

Fidler, F. (2002). The 5th edition of the APA Publication Manual: Why its statistics recommendations are so controversial. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 62, 749-770.

Fidler, F. and Thompson, B. (2001). Computing Correct Confidence Intervals for ANOVA fixed and random effect sizes. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 61, 575-604.

Note: Geoff Cumming’s staff page has pdfs of several of these articles.

Book Chapters

Fidler, F. (in preparation, invited). Reporting, Sharing, and Re-Analyzing Data: Lessons from the Medical Sciences. The Ethics of Quantitative Methodology: A Handbook for Researchers Taylor and Francis (Multivariate Application Book Series).

Fidler, F. & Cumming, G. (in preparation, invited). From Hypothesis Testing to Estimation. The Ethics of Quantitative Methodology: A Handbook for Researchers Taylor and Francis (Multivariate Application Book Series).

Fidler, F. (in press, invited). Statistical Significance, Result Worthiness and Evidence:
What lessons are there for giftedness education in other disciplines? In B. Thompson & R. Subotnik (Eds.). Research Methodologies for conducting research on giftedness. Washington, USA: American Psychological Association.

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.

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.

DiStefano, J., Fidler, F. and Cumming, G. (2005). Effect size estimates and confidence intervals: An alternative focus for the presentation and interpretation of ecological data. (Ch 3, pp. 71-102). In A.R. Burk (Ed.) New Trends in Ecology Research. Hauppauge NY: Nova Science Publishers.

Referred Conference Proceedings (published proceedings)

Fidler, F. (2006). Should Psychology abandon p values and teach confidence intervals instead? Evidence-based reforms in statistics education. Working co-operatively in statistics education. Proceedings of ICOTS-7, Seventh International Conference on Teaching Statistics. Salvador, Brazil.

Cumming, G. and Fidler, F. (2005). Interval estimates for statistics communication: Problems and possible solutions. Proceedings of Statistics Education and the Communication of Statistics, International Association for Statistics Education. Sydney, Australia.

Fidler, F. (2005).Confidence Intervals in practice. Proceedings of the 55th International Statistics Institute Session. Sydney, Australia.

Fidler, F. and Cumming, G. (2005). Teaching confidence intervals: Problems and potential solutions. Proceedings of the 55th International Statistics Institute Session. Sydney, Australia.

Cumming, G., Fidler, F. and Thomason, N. (2002). The statistical re-education of psychology. In B. Phillips (Ed.) Developing a statistically literate society. Proceedings of ICOTS-6, Sixth International Conference on Teaching Statistics, 1-6. Voorburg, The Netherlands.

Grants
Cumming, G. and Fidler, F.
Funding: 2007-2010, $355, 852. Evidence based improvement of statistical inference practices in psychology and other disciplines. ARC Discovery Grant and Australian Post-doctoral Fellowship.

Thomason, N., Barnard, K., Carey, J. and Fidler, F.
Funding 2008: $60, 000. Plain English for risk communication. ACERA research grant.

Supervision
Honours
Rachael Hamilton-Keene (Feb 2009). The ‘no overlap’ misconception of confidence intervals in medicine. School of Psychological Science, La Trobe University.

Debbie Hansen (2008). Reviewing clinical psychology: Meta-analysis versus the narrative review. School of Psychological Science, La Trobe University.

Simon Carter (2007). Understanding confidence intervals: Interval cognition and evaluation. School of Psychological Science, La Trobe University.

Andrew Speirs-Bridge (2007). The influence of elicitation format, cognitive style, and forecast period on the rates-of-disease predictions of infectious disease experts. School of Psychological Science, La Trobe University.

Pawel Kalinowski (2006). Overcoming the inverse probability fallacy: A comparison of two teaching interventions. School of Psychological Science, La Trobe University.

Masters
Andrew Speirs-Bridge (2008-expected completion 2010). Professional training and expertise in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. School of Psychological Science, La Trobe University.

PhD
Pawel Kalinowski (2007-expected completion 2010). The cognition of confidence intervals. (Supervising with Prof Geoff Cumming). School of Psychological Science, La Trobe University.

Jerry Lai (2008-expected completion 2011). Statistical cognition of p values and confidence intervals: Implications for statistical reform in psychology. (Supervising with Prof Geoff Cumming). School of Psychological Science, La Trobe University.

Bonnie Wintle (2006-expected completion 2010). Values, decisions and the environment. (Supervising with Prof Mark Burgman). Australian Centre of Excellence for Risk Analysis (ACERA), School of Botany, University of Melbourne.