We explore the tensions between cooperation and competition in the context of improving the content, delivery and penetration of statistics education. We explore models for increasing the numbers of students studying statistics and how working in teams can increase the quality of the teaching that students experience.
This paper is a culmination of the study carried out after using project work as an intervention to enhance the learning of statistics as a service subject. It discusses how a project encompassing real-world problems directly relevant to the learners chosen career-path helps in motivating and sustaining the students' quest for learning statistics. The sample group comprised of learners studying towards the Diploma in Extraction Metallurgy and the project work was centred on the main-stream course Mineral Processing. This project was based on actual experiments conducted by learners in their Mineral Processing course so that learners could see the relevance of applied statistics to main-stream courses. The learners' performance was tracked throughout this study.
This article discusses a real-life example of statistics in gambling.
This article presents an activity which simulates the linear regression model in order to verify the probabilistic behaviour of the resulting least-squares statistics in practice.
This article critically explores several issues related to requirements for probability teaching in various national curricula.
The teaching of probability theory has been steadily declining in introductory statistics courses as students have difficulty with handling the rules of probability. In this article, we give a data-driven approach, based on two-way tables, which helps students to become familiar with using the usual rules but without the formal structure.
Correlation is introduced intuitively early in the school curriculum by considering patterns in scatter diagrams. Later on, various formulae are used for calculating correlation coefficients. This article suggests ways in which the formulae can be related to the scatter diagrams.
A homework assignment led to the observation that the Cox and Stuart test is not symmetric under the transposition of the two variables. Examples of this feature are presented.
This article deals with professional development strategies for teaches to use in initiating and supporting mathematical thinking through data-collecting experiences in contexts that are meaning to the children, as well as nurturing the children's efforts in recording and reasoning with data.
The article focuses on how elementary school students engage with developing a statistical question (how students learn about developing and refining a question for data collection) and the analysis part of the data. For the analytic part, how students make sense of their data once they are collected, e.g. how they relate graphs, numbers, and statistics back to their original question, is addressed in this article.