Despite the recommendation of the General Dental Council that statistical methods and data analysis should form part of the curriculum of undergraduate dental degrees, little is known about the teaching of statistics in dental schools. This informal study was carried out to obtain information on the methods of teaching and assessment used in dental schools in Britain and Ireland.
This paper reports the results of an exploratory study of the characteristics of key information products released by statistics agencies. Such products are central to debates and decisions in the public arena, but have received little attention in the literature on statistical literacy, statistics education, or adult numeracy. Based on a qualitative analysis of Internet-based products of six national and international statistics agencies, the paper sketches the characteristics of five product types (Indicators, Press releases, Executive summaries, Reports, and Aggregate data) and of the environment in which they are found. The paper discusses implications for the specification of the skills needed for accessing, filtering, comprehending, and critically evaluating information in these products. Directions for future research and educational practice are outlined.
This paper begins with a discussion of the nature of statistical reasoning, and then describes the development and validation of the Statistical Reasoning Assessment (SRA), an instrument consisting of 20 multiple-choice items involving probability and statistics concepts. Each item offers several choices of responses, both correct and incorrect, which include statements of reasoning explaining the rationale for a particular choice. Students are instructed to select the response that best matches their own thinking about each problem. The SRA provides 16 scores which indicate the level of students' correct reasoning in eight different areas and the extent of their incorrect reasoning in eight related areas. Results are presented of a cross-cultural study using the SRA to compare the reasoning of males and females in two countries.
Students in the same statistics course learn different things, and view the role of the lecturer in different ways. We report on empirical research on students' conceptions of learning statistics, their expectations of teaching, and the relationship between them. The research is based on interviews, analysed using a qualitative methodology, with statistics students studying for a mathematics degree. Students expressed a range of conceptions of learning in statistics and a range of conceptions of their lecturers' teaching. These conceptions of learning and teaching were related, but not as closely or as exclusively as previous researchers have indicated. Looking at what students expect of teachers and their views of their own learning provides an opportunity for teachers to develop teaching practices that challenge students to move towards more integrated conceptions of statistics learning.
In this paper we present an exploratory study intended to characterise University students' understanding of correlation and regression. We analyse the solutions to two problems from an intentional sample of 193 students who had previously received a course of descriptive statistics at the University. We study the student's procedures and discuss their difficulties and errors concerning the centre of gravity in the scatter plot, regression lines, correlation coefficient, type of relation between the variables and prediction.
The aim of this study was, first, to provide evidence to support the notion of statistical literacy as a hierarchical construct and, second, to identify levels of this hierarchy across the construct. The study used archived data collected from two large-scale research projects that studied aspects of statistical understanding of over 3000 school students in grades 3 to 9, based on 80 questionnaire items. Rasch analysis was used to explore an hypothesised underlying construct associated with statistical literacy. The analysis supported the hypothesis of a unidimensional construct and suggested six levels of understanding: Idiosyncratic, Informal, Inconsistent, Consistent non-critical, Critical, and Critical mathematical. These levels could be used by teachers and curriculum developers to incorporate appropriate aspects of statistical literacy into the existing curriculum.
Definitions of research in statistical education are discussed. A system of keywords for categorising statistical education research is outlined. Proposals for a Web-based survey of statistical education researchers to collect details of their research activities in statistical education, and the design of a database to store these details are described.
Many teachers and researchers use the Statistical Product and Service Solutions (SPSS) software for instructional and/ or research purposes. Because of the comprehensive nature and features of this program, there are various textbooks available that may offer teachers and practitioners a more concise way to analyze and discuss many of the topics that are typically taught in statistics courses. These textbooks differ on many different features, such as level of the audience, complexity of statistical procedures discussed, degree of interpretation of statistics/output, amount of detail discussed on the basic mechanics, accessibility of data files, and student exercises. This paper is written to offer teachers and researchers a review of some of the most popular SPSS textbooks that are available today by utilizing evaluation criteria previously discussed in the literature. This review can provide a starting point for teachers to explore features of the various SPSS textbooks as well as to consider what book is most appropriate based on their own teaching style. Comments from teachers who use the software, limitations of the review, and a table of other ancillary textbook data conclude the paper.
Nowadays, the importance of affectivity in statistics education is widely acknowledged. In the past two decades a large number of instruments to measure attitudes and anxiety toward statistics have been developed in order to assess the influence of emotional factor on students' training. However, many of these instruments have not been analysed in depth and their psychometric properties have not properly been assessed. The aim of this paper is revising the research works that have contributed empirical evidence for the reliability and validity of these instruments. Our results suggest the need for more research about instruments to measure attitudes and anxiety about statistics. We conclude by suggesting some priority research areas that might be relevant in future studies on this topic.
This paper describes a classroom teaching experiment, concerning the concept of probability, with children aged 5 in a kindergarten school. The teaching experiment was based on constructivist and interactionist theories about the learning of school mathematics and lasted one month. The collection of the information was based on the tape-recorded interviews with the children (each child was interviewed prior to the research program, at the end of the program and one month later) and the videotaped teaching sessions. During the program, we identified three critical steps in the development of the children's probabilistic thinking: a) the interpretation of the "different" outcomes in a two stage experiment, b) the acceptance of the realization of the experiment for resolving their conflicting viewpoints, and c) estimating the outcomes in a problem. At the end of the program the majority of the children managed to overcome their subjective interpretations and seemed to develop a primitive quantitative reasoning in probabilistic tasks.