Dr. Mecklin's Research and Scholarly Activity
My major research interests are in goodness-of-fit testing, educational statistics, statistical ecology, Monte Carlo studies, and statistical education. I am very concerned with assumptions of statistical techniques, such as the assumption of normality, and the affects of the violation of these assumptions upon subsequent analyses.
My dissertation was entitled "A Comparison of the Power of Classical and Newer Tests of Multivariate Normality". In my dissertation, I conducted an extensive review of the statistical literature concerning testing multivariate normality, and a Monte Carlo study of the power of the most commonly used procedures, along with the most promising newer procedures, against a variety of departures from normality. Two articles can come from this dissertation, appearing in International Statistics and Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation.
I am increasing my knowledge of Bayesian statistics, particularly MCMC (Markov Chain Monte Carlo), so that I can apply these innovative methods to problems in educational and biological research. I am working on a paper that applies the Gibbs sampler towards estimating a measure of species diversity. This research was motivated by a practical problem involving a decline in the diversity of freshwater mussels in the Ohio River. I presented some of this research at the Joint Statistical Meetings and The International Environmetrics Society and will continue in this area.
Although I have become interested in statistical ecology since coming to Murray State, I am also endeavoring to stay active in my "natural" field of educational statistics. My current interests in educational statistics concern the use of equivalence testing, the never-ending null hypothesis testing controversy, and the methodology of Monte Carlo simulation studies. I published a paper on equivalence testing in Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods and have continued pursuing this work with Nathan Hirtz (a M.S. student who has now graduated).
I also had a chance as a graduate student, especially through my position as a consultant in the University of Northern Colorado's Research Consulting Lab, to work with graduate students and faculty members from a variety of disciplines. I have consulted with people from such diverse fields as community health, educational psychology, chemistry education, physical education, and wildlife biology. I have been acknowledged for statistical consultation and advice on several theses and dissertations. I have also been a co-presenter for papers given in the fields of science education and community health.
At Murray State University, I have consulted with professors, graduate students, and undergraduate students from several departments, including biology, water science and geoscience. I am currently serving on the thesis committee of several graduate students and look forward to continuing to work with students (graduate and undergraduate) and faculty. I am also currently involved with the BioMAPS grant, which trains undergraduates for interdisciplinary research in biology and mathematics.
My third research interest is in statistical education. I currently teach
introductory statistics to undergraduates and I have a strong desire to
continue teaching statistics at this level. Since it is well known that many
students come into a statistics course with negative views of the subject
and/or a fear of the mathematical content, I am interested in improving the
quality of undergraduate statistics education. Thus, I strive to keep myself
up-to-date with the statistical education literature. I had a paper (co-written
with Robert Donnelly) that appeared in Journal of Statistics Education.
I have also co-written a paper with a group of chemistry educators on using
graphing calculators in the college science classroom that appeared in Journal
of Chemical Education.