Suppose your superintendent asked you to determine whether voucher students are doing better than non-voucher students in your district's elementary schools. You might perform a simple t test or an analysis of variance to find your answer. You would report mean differences and probability levels. And if your superintendent is like most non-statisticians, he or she would accept the magic of statistics without questioning the validity of the assumptions made to use the t test.

Thanks to advances in computer technology, educational researchers are beginning to use simpler statistical methods. These techniques let us empirically address a wider range of questions with smaller data sets and with fewer, less restrictive assumptions. Using such techniques, we can focus on reasoning and on understanding the data, not on complicated formulas and tables. The techniques promise to make statistics a useful, easily learned tool for educational policy makers and researchers.