Remote teaching of publication-quality, single-case graphs in Microsoft Excel

Area of Science:

• Behavioral Science
• Data Visualization
• Educational Technology

Background:

• Microsoft Excel is a widely accessible tool for creating scientific graphs.
• Single-case design graphs are crucial for visualizing behavioral data.
• Existing tutorials often focus on specialized software, limiting accessibility.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the effectiveness of a video tutorial and checklist for teaching graph creation in Microsoft Excel.
• To assess student learning and satisfaction in creating single-case design graphs using Excel.
• To determine the utility of Excel for generating publication-quality graphs for multiple-baseline, multielement, and reversal designs.

Main Methods:

• Systematic replication of a GraphPad Prism video tutorial adapted for Microsoft Excel.
• Training 24 master's students on creating multiple-baseline, multielement, and reversal graphs.
• Assessing student accuracy before and after training, and measuring satisfaction.

Main Results:

• Student accuracy significantly improved from 25% pretraining to 86% with the video tutorial and 96% with the checklist for multiple-baseline graphs.
• High accuracy was maintained for multielement (93-94%) and reversal (82-94%) graphs using the same methods.
• Students reported moderate to high satisfaction with the training materials.

Conclusions:

• Video tutorials and review checklists are effective for teaching scientist-practitioners to create single-case design graphs in Excel.
• Microsoft Excel is a viable, cost-effective alternative to specialized software for data visualization.
• These training components support the use of Excel 2016, 2019, and Office 365 for generating publication-quality graphs.