I want to know why statistics is important in psychology and education?

doing a paper and I have to state why ststistics is important in the field of psychology and education.

I want to know why statistics is important in psychology and education?
Most times statistics are used in psychology to measure whether the results of an experiment shows genuinely "significant" differences within the results, or whether all of the results fit within a single range.





For example, there have been studies which "appear" to show that boys' and girls' academic performance goes in non-synchronous waves.





If you measured the performance of all the pupils in a school in a certain year in a certain subject you could tell (using chi square, for example) whether the performance of the boys (as a group) was statistically different from the performance of the girls (as a group), or whether the performance of all the students in that year, in that subject, fell within the same "range".





If there is a significant difference you can use "standard deviations" as a measure of just how big the difference is.





(I don't have any URLs on hand, but you can look up "statistical significance" and "standard deviations" online.)
Reply:because they are not exact sciences, what is right and sane is determined by the majority.
Reply:As my professors say... Numbers don't lie. People use numbers to lie.
Reply:who says you need stats in psych?
Reply:Because the capacity, knowledge, functions of the human mind in itself is impossible to measure. Statistics are necessary because people need measurements in numbers and mathematics to define things that they wil otherwise never have a way to understand.
Reply:to show a norm and how close or far from it ___ is. like a measuring stick.. its the only way to show that something is or isn't normal, since most people dont know what the norm is in those fields... since there is so much variety.


hope this helps
Reply:Just to add to what alot of people have already said, statisitics and statistical methods can also be used to test whether trends across large sets of data occur by chance. This can be used to test weaknesses across a educational systems (such as in the UK with educational League tables etc), or to test trends in the behaviour of large groups of people in psychological research.
Reply:in education and also psychology you need many times to judge the results of some accurance. you will guess it only using probality. you will have choices many times in these fields. when ask to choose one then you will only use statistics.. thats all
Reply:try explaining to a retard why he/she is retarded without some sort of statistic.