Teaching

  • This article describes an innovative curriculum module the first author created on the two-way exchange between statistics and applied ethics. The module, having no particular mathematical prerequisites beyond high school algebra, is part of an undergraduate interdisciplinary ethics course which begins with a 3-week introduction to basic applied ethics taught by a philosophy professor (the second author), and continues with 3-week modules from professors in various other disciplines. The first author's module's emphasis on conceptual and critical thinking makes it easily adaptable to service-level courses as well as readily expandable for more mathematically sophisticated audiences. Through in-class explorations and discussions, the module made connections to contemporary topics such as the death penalty, equal pay for equal work, and profiling. This article shares examples, resources, strategies and lessons learned for instructors wishing to develop their own modules of various lengths.

  • In this paper, we present an interactive teaching approach to introduce the concept of optimal design of experiments to students. Our approach is based on the use of spreadsheets. One advantage of this approach is that no complex mathematical theory is needed nor that any design construction algorithm has to be discussed at the introductory stage. Another benefit is that the students build all necessary matrices for concrete examples starting from a sensible initial design. By modifying the initial design by trial and error, they can try to improve the properties of the parameter estimators interactively. For problems in which finding the optimal design is not evident, they can use optimization software which is readily available in the spreadsheet software.

  • Courses in clinical epidemiology usually include acquainting students with a single 2X2 table. All diagnostic test characteristics are explained using this table. This pedagogic approach may be misleading. A new didactic approach is hereby proposed, using two tables, each with specific analogous notations (uppercase and lowercase) and derived equations. This approach makes it easier to discuss the use of Bayes' Theorem and the two stages of analyses, i.e., using sensitivity to calculate predictive values. Two different types of false negative rates and false positive rates are discussed.

  • In teaching undergraduate time series courses, we have used a mixture of various statistical packages. We have finally been able to teach all of the applied concepts within one statistical package; R. This article describes the process that we use to conduct a thorough analysis of a time series. An example with a data set is provided. We compare these results to an identical analysis performed on Minitab.

  • In Japan, many students in women's junior college dislike statistics. In order to arouse students' interest in statistics, we had tried to develop teaching materials for many years and succeeded in arousing their interest in statistics.

  • Speaking of the teaching and learning of statistics at the undergraduate level, a moderate amount of training in small-scale data-handling seems to be an indispensable part of an introductory program in statistics. (See {1}.) In the Pakistani system of statistical education, however, there is very little emphasis on the conduct of practical projects involving collection and analysis of real data. ( See {2}.) Realizing the importance of such projects, the Department of Statistics at Kinnaird College for Women, Lahore initiated a series of small-scale statistical surveys back in 1985. ( See {3}, {4} and {5}) Each of these surveys has consisted of (a) identification of a topic of interest, (b) formulation of a questionnaire, (c) collection of data from a sample of individuals / a population of interest, (d) a fairly detailed analysis of the collected data, and (e) presentation of the survey findings in front of teachers and students in the form of an educational and entertaining program. Combining information with other items of interest, such a program provides an effective forum for increasing the popularity of a discipline that is generally considered to be a tough and "dry" subject.<br><br>The following section of this paper throws light on various segments of the most recent one of these programs. The one which was held in the college hall on November 12, 1999, and in which a group of students belonging to the FA Second Year Statistics Class (grade 12, ages 17-18) presented salient features of a survey that had been carried out in order to explore the plus points as well as the problems experienced by the female nurses of Lahore (the author acting as compere/moderator for the program).

  • If it is accepted that the concepts of probability are complicated, it should be also accepted that they are very near to the daily life of common people. Anyway, everybody has to face a variety of situations of uncertainty that can cause either anxiety or joy. As the idea is to teach these concepts to the students, the best way to do it is to have fun when carrying it out. This paper reports the experience with a group of students who are preparing to become high school teachers, in the world of probability by talking about soccer. With this sport as a reference a question is posed such that when students are asked about it, it not only allows an interesting probabilistic analysis, but also takes them, when solving it, to other mathematics concepts like limits and derivatives. The whole situation is presented: its position as conjecture, attempts of answering that include computer work and graphics up to its formal proof.

  • The Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics (NCTM 1989) states in Standard 11 for grades 9 through 12 that students should have oportunities to "use experimental and theoretical probabilities to represent and solve problems involving ncertainty." Standard 1 emphasizes the importance of students' learning to "formulate problems from situations within and outside mathematics." This article discusses a simply stated problem involving uncertainty that students can investigate experimentally or theoretcially. The problem places students in the role of problem formulator by giving them opportunities to generate various interesting problems of their own on the basis of a given situation. By changing certain characteristics of the original problem, students can be introduced to some fundamental concepts of decision making in two -player games.

  • As teachers explore alternative forms of assessment for the classroom, interest increases in all aspects of observational assessment--what to look for, how to look for it, how to document it, and how to use it. This article offers some hints from the experiences of teachers who have experimented with observational assessment.

  • What is the chance of that!? It is a question that almost all people ask--sometimes after the fact--in trying to make sense of a seemingly improbably event and, at other times, in preparation for action, as an attempt to foresee and plan for all the possibilities that lie ahead. In either case, it is mathematics in general, and probability and statistics in particular, that the public looks to for a final answer to this question. One out of one hundred, 4 to 1 odds, an expected lifetime of 75 years--these are the sorts of answers people want. When used honestly and correctly, numbers can help clarify the essence of a confusing situation by decoupling it from prejudicial assumptions or emotional conclusions. When used incorrectly--or even worse, deceitfully--they can lend a false sense of scientific objectivity to an assertion, misleading those who are not careful enough or knowledgeable enough to look into the reasoning underlying the numerical conclusions.<br><br>It is important to be able to distinguish between these two scenarios. ...

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