This activity provides practice for constructing confidence intervals and performing hypothesis tests. In addition, it stresses interpretation of confidence intervals and comparison and application of results in context.
This activity explains the important features of a distribution: shape, center, spread, and unusual features. It also covers how to determine the difference between mean and median, and their respective measures of spread, as well as when to apply them to a particular distribution. Graphical displays such as: histograms and boxplots are also introduced in this activity. The corresponding data set for this activity is found at the following web address: http://www.causeweb.org/repository/ACT/food.txt
This activity focuses on basic ideas of linear regression. It covers creating scatterplots from data, describing the association between two variables, and correlation as a measure of linear association. After this activity students will have the knowledge to create output that yields R-square, the slope and intercept, as well as their interpretations. This activity also covers some of the basics about residual analysis and the fit of the linear regression model in certain settings. The corresponding data set for this activity, 'BAC data', can be found at the following web address: http://www.causeweb.org/repository/ACT/BAC.txt
Funded by the National Science Foundation, workshops were held over a three-year period, each with about twenty participants nearly equally divided between mathematics educators and statisticians. In these exchanges the mathematics educators presented honest assessments of the status of mathematics education research (both its strengths and its weaknesses), and the statisticians provided insights into modern statistical methods that could be more widely used in such research. The discussions led to an outline of guidelines for evaluating and reporting mathematics education research, which were molded into the current report. The purpose of the reporting guidelines is to foster the development of a stronger foundation of research in mathematics education, one that will be scientific, cumulative, interconnected, and intertwined with teaching practice. The guidelines are built around a model involving five key components of a high-quality research program: generating ideas, framing those ideas in a research setting, examining the research questions in small studies, generalizing the results in larger and more refined studies, and extending the results over time and location. Any single research project may have only one or two of these components, but such projects should link to others so that a viable research program that will be interconnected and cumulative can be identified and used to effect improvements in both teaching practice and future research. The guidelines provide details that are essential for these linkages to occur. Three appendices provide background material dealing with (a) a model for research in mathematics education in light of a medical model for clinical trials; (b) technical issues of measurement, unit of randomization, experiments vs. observations, and gain scores as they relate to scientifically based research; and (c) critical areas for cooperation between statistics and mathematics education research, including qualitative vs. quantitative research, educating graduate students and keeping mathematics education faculty current in education research, statistics practices and methodologies, and building partnerships and collaboratives.
A cartoon to teach about the importance of blinding the researcher to which comparison group the subjects are in. Cartoon by John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea from Dennis Pearl (The Ohio State University). Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites.
A cartoon to teach about the use of placebos in experiments. Cartoon by John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea from Dennis Pearl (The Ohio State University). Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites.