Today: Intellectus Statistics (statistics software for education market)
Company description: Intellectus Statistics is cloud-based statistical analysis software that allows users to conduct analyses without requiring statistical expertise. The output is in the form of plain English sentences, formatted in the APA style, to make understanding statistical results easier than ever.
[Editor’s note: APA Style is a writing style and format for academic documents such as scholarly journal articles and books. It is described in the style guide of the American Psychological Association (APA), which is titled the “Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association.”]
Intellectus Statistics is a patented statistics platform that enables users to easily conduct statistical analyses, then provides in-depth, interpreted output in seconds. The main market is education, and secondarily, survey companies, and health, education and market research companies.
Intellectus is a privately held company, in business since 2012 and based in Palm Harbor, Fla. Dr. James Lani is the CEO.
Products and Services
Intellectus Statistics consists of one platform with seven distinct parts:
- an Interactive Decision-tree helps the user decide which of 25 statistical tests is the correct analyses based on the type of question they are asking;
- Data Analysis plan offers 38 downloadable data analysis plans that include assumptions and references;
- the downloadable Power Analysis feature provides over 50 statistical power analyses to help the user decide what the appropriate sample size should be for each a small, medium, and large effect size;
- Management function allows users to easily impute data, remove multivariate and univariate outliers, transform or bin data, and other data management tasks;
- the Plots function allows users to create a scatterplot, bubble plot, histogram, line plot, profile plot, bar plot, pie chart, box plot, and control charts. The control charts are unique in that the program interprets the plot based on Joint Commission and six other rulesets;
- the Analyses function allows users to select over 60 different statistical analyses. For each analysis, the assumptions are automatically preloaded, the assumptions and findings are interpreted in plain English prose, and associated tables and figures are presented as well; and
- the Projects function allows for uploading of data from numerous sources, and the Share feature permits real-time collaboration of a project(s).
Key Features
Interprets output in English prose; interprets control charts, preloads and interprets assumptions of analyses, preloads and interprets post-hoc tests, creates APA tables, built-in power analysis, interactive decision tree, share feature to easily collaborate, glossary of terms and symbols, APA references for in-text citations.
Insight and Analysis
There is little general analysis of Intellectus available at this time; however, there are some scholarly papers for educational use cases that discuss the technology, such as this one by Allen C. Chen, Sabrina Moran, Yuting Sun and Kim-Phuong L. Vu and presented at the International Conference on Engineering Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics in 2018.
Usability compared to other applications is considered a plus for Intellectus. Here is a selection from the summary of the report: “The purpose of this study was to compare the effectiveness and efficiency of using IS and SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) to conduct and interpret analyses. An output presented in narrative format could be beneficial to students learning statistics who may have difficulty interpreting results. Overall, accuracy scores and time on task for the two software were not significantly different. Perceived usability and ease of use ratings for IS were significantly higher compared to SPSS. On the other hand, ratings of perceived usefulness were not significantly different between the two software. Results also suggested that participants preferred IS and felt more confident in conducting statistical analyses when using the software. Though there was no significant difference in task accuracy between the two software, data-to-text output helped students with interpreting assumptions for analyses and formatting written results.”
List of current customers: California State University Fullerton, Arizona State University, SUNY, Arkansas State University, Grand Canyon University, University of North Carolina Wilmington, University of Maryland, University of Louisiana Lafayette.
Other key players in this market: SPSS, R, SAS
Delivery: SAAS (software as a service)
Pricing: Academic six-month and annual subscriptions and annual subscriptions for non-profits, commercial, and government use. For pricing, call 888-383-6639or email [email protected].
Contact information for potential customers: [email protected]; www.IntellectusStatistics.com, 888-383-6639
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