Fifty Psychological and Psychiatric Terms to Avoid: a List of Inaccurate, Misleading, Misused, Ambiguous, and Logically Confused Words and Phrases

The goal of this article is to promote clear thinking and clear writing among students and teachers of psychological science by curbing terminological misinformation and confusion. To this end, we present a provisional list of 50 commonly used terms in psychology, psychiatry, and allied fields that should be avoided, or at most used sparingly and with explicit caveats. We provide corrective information for students, instructors, and researchers regarding these terms, which we organize for expository purposes into five categories: inaccurate or misleading terms, frequently misused terms, ambiguous terms, oxymorons, and pleonasms. For each term, we (a) explain why it is problematic, (b) delineate one or more examples of its misuse, and (c) when pertinent, offer recommendations for preferable terms. By being more judicious in their use of terminology, psychologists and psychiatrists can foster clearer thinking in their students and the field at large regarding mental phenomena

Untenable nonstationarity: An assessment of the fitness for purpose of trend tests in hydrology

The detection and attribution of long-term patterns in hydrological time series have been important research topics for decades. A significant portion of the literature regards such patterns as ‘deterministic components’ or ‘trends’ even though the complexity of hydrological systems does not allow easy deterministic explanations and attributions. Consequently, trend estimation techniques have been developed to make and justify statements about tendencies in the historical data, which are often used to predict future events. Testing trend hypothesis on observed time series is widespread in the hydro-meteorological literature mainly due to the interest in detecting consequences of human activities on the hydrological cycle. This analysis usually relies on the application of some null hypothesis significance tests (NHSTs) for slowly-varying and/or abrupt changes, such as Mann-Kendall, Pettitt, or similar, to summary statistics of hydrological time series (e.g., annual averages, maxima, minima, etc.). However, the reliability of this application has seldom been explored in detail. This paper discusses misuse, misinterpretation, and logical flaws of NHST for trends in the analysis of hydrological data from three different points of view: historic-logical, semantic-epistemological, and practical. Based on a review of NHST rationale, and basic statistical definitions of stationarity, nonstationarity, and ergodicity, we show that even if the empirical estimation of trends in hydrological time series is always feasible from a numerical point of view, it is uninformative and does not allow the inference of nonstationarity without assuming a priori additional information on the underlying stochastic process, according to deductive reasoning. This prevents the use of trend NHST outcomes to support nonstationary frequency analysis and modeling. We also show that the correlation structures characterizing hydrological time series might easily be underestimated, further compromising the attempt to draw conclusions about trends spanning the period of records. Moreover, even though adjusting procedures accounting for correlation have been developed, some of them are insufficient or are applied only to some tests, while some others are theoretically flawed but still widely applied. In particular, using 250 unimpacted stream flow time series across the conterminous United States (CONUS), we show that the test results can dramatically change if the sequences of annual values are reproduced starting from daily stream flow records, whose larger sizes enable a more reliable assessment of the correlation structures

Co-constructing decimal number knowledge

This mathematics education research provides significant insights for the teaching of decimals to children. It is well known that decimals is one of the most difficult topics to learn and teach. Annette’s research is unique in that it focuses not only on the cognitive, but also on the affective and conative aspects of learning and teaching of decimals. The study is innovative as it includes the students as co-constructors and co-researchers. The findings open new ways of thinking for educators about how students cognitively process decimal knowledge, as well as how students might develop a sense of self as a learner, teacher and researcher in mathematics

Investigation of the Misconceptions Related to the Concepts of Equivalence and Literal Symbols Held by Underprepared Community College Students

Many students struggle to learn mathematics in K-8 grades. Research has shown that lower grade students often misconceive equivalence as an operation rather than a relation, and that students also form various misconceptions of literal symbols. Many students arrive at college seriously underprepared in mathematics, but there is scant research on the difficulties and misconceptions of these college students. The purpose of this research was to learn if underprepared community college students harbor misconceptions of equivalence and of literal symbols similar to K-8 students. For this study, 191 underprepared college students were surveyed for misconceptions by a questionnaire of 43 items selected from the established suite of effective items. The items for each concept were further partitioned into the definition, properties, and applications of each concept. Many students (84%) were expert regarding the definition of equivalence. An additional 13% of the students also demonstrated knowledge of the concept, although they did not always take advantage of it. Similarly, over 40% of the students demonstrated expert understanding of the properties of equivalence, but an additional 53% demonstrated a restricted understanding of the concept. Only 5% of the students were considered expert with the fundamental applications of equivalence and less than 60% demonstrated a basic knowledge of the applications. Few students (33%) were knowledgeable of the definition of literal symbols, and fewer (\u3c 5%) demonstrated knowledge of the properties of the literal symbol. Consequent to their minimal knowledge of the concept, very few students were able to demonstrate knowledge of literal symbol applications. Community college students underprepared in mathematics are generally aware of the relational definition of equivalence, but many are not fluent in its use. Most attention needs to be directed to the applications of equivalence. The same students are generally not aware of the concept of literal symbols and much attention needs to be directed not only at the applications of literal symbols, but also at their definition and properties