About William:

I have been teaching psychology, research methods and statistics at major universities and colleges for 30 years because I enjoy the process of helping students see the simple beauty of these subjects. In psychology I have taught: (a) Cognitive Psychology, (b)Sensation & Perception, (c) Human Memory, (d) Psycholinguistics, (e)Introductory Psychology, (f) History and Systems, (g) Research Methods, (f) Psychometrics, (g)Learning and Motivation, (h)Personality, and (i) Statistics. Most of these courses were on the undergraduate level, but I did teach a year-long graduate level course in Psychometrics and another graduate level course in Cognitive and Emotional Bases of Behavior and delivered several invited lectures on Classical and Item-Response Theory approaches to Psychometrics as well as an invited address on Innovations in Statistical Analysis to the American Psychological Association.

All of these courses are a lot of fun, but I also know that students generally fear more quantitative subjects, especially statistics. Every time I begin a class in statistics, I tell the students that by the end of the course, they are not only going to understand statistics, but actually like it! I universally get a huge round of laughter that lasts for several seconds and lingers for a couple of minutes, but by the end of the class, lots of students come up to me spontaneously and tell me: "You know, I actually do like statistics!" I think the reason why they loose their fear and embrace the subject is that I teach it from the ground up and proceed like ocean waves, returning for a brief refresher of what we have learned already and then expand that knowledge to a new level of understanding. It really is a beautiful, connected system for seeing patterns in the complexity of the relationships between and among variables. My students have ranged from traditional undergraduates to adult learners who have gone back to school after first pursuing their careers.

One of my most treasured things to do is to help people develop their Master's Theses and Dissertations. Just recently, I connected with a person on linkedin who had gone to one of the Universities I formerly taught at she told me she had given up on ever completing her dissertation. I asked her to tell me a little bit about her dissertation and made some practical suggestions about how she could easily get it done in a short period of time. Soon she told me she had dusted off her thesis and her dissertation proposal and as we exchanged emails about it, the idea grew, she reconnected with her committee and is now going at it full steam ahead. Another student was referred to me by a colleague because the student had collected her data, but knew nothing (that she remembered at least) about quantitative analysis. She was doubtful at first, but once we started talking and I told her in simple terms what she had to do and offered to sit right there with her and show her how to do the analysis in SPSS, she came to life! Within a couple of weeks she had the exploratory analyses done and I mentioned to her that we could easily do some structural equation modeling using Mplus. Two weeks later, she was done!