Describes a project where computer-assisted graphical data analyses were introduced to inner-city high school students with weak math and science backgrounds. Provides examples of performance of students on open-ended problem-solving tasks.
Describes a project where computer-assisted graphical data analyses were introduced to inner-city high school students with weak math and science backgrounds. Provides examples of performance of students on open-ended problem-solving tasks.
Technology has been used as an active learning tool in Workshop Statistics, a project that involved the development and implementation of curricular materials which guide students to learn fundamental statistical ideas through self-discovery. Using the workshop approach, the lecture-format was completely abandoned. Classes are held in microcomputer-equipped classrooms in which students spend class-time working<br>collaboratively on activities carefully designed to enable them to discover statistical concepts, explore statistical principles, and apply statistical techniques.<br><br>The workshop approach uses technology in three ways. First, technology is used to perform the calculations and present the visual displays necessary to analyze real datasets, which are often large and cumbersome. Freeing students from these computational chores also empowers the instructor to focus attention on the understanding of concepts and interpretation of results. Second, technology is used to conduct simulations, which allow students to visualize and explore the long-term behavior of sample statistics under repeated random sampling. Whereas these two uses of technology are fairly standard, the most distinctive use of technology within the workshop approach is to enable students to explore statistical phenomena. Students make predictions about a statistical property and then use the computer to investigate their predictions, revising their predictions and iterating the process as necessary.
The success of any probability curriculum for developing students' probabilistic reasoning depends greatly on teachers' understanding of probability as well as a much deeper understanding of issues such as students' misconceptions (Stohl, p. 351, this chapter).<br><br>The purpose of this chapter is to investigate issues concerning the nature and development of teachers' probability understanding. The chapter begins with a discussion of central issues that affect teachers' efforts to facilitate students' probabilistic understanding. I then examine teachers' knowledge and beliefs about probability, their ability to teach probabilistic ideas, and lessons learned from programs in teacher education that have aimed at developing teachers' knowledge about probability.
The purpose of this chapter is to share the insights we gained from implementing a task with sixth-grade students as they learned to draw inferences from empirical data. To accomplish this goal we begin by describing the key features of the task that elicit and extend students' reasoning. Next we provide several contrasting examples that exemplify the notion of "compelling evidence" among middle grades students, and then offer provisions for individual differences. Finally we argue that carefullydesigned instructional tasks can engage students of all different ages in statistical inference and promote the development of powerful connections between data and chance.
This article discusses a lesson that explores important mathematical topics in the context of this popular board game [Scrabble]. Specifcally, this lesson meets the recommendations of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics to give middle school students opportunities to make conjectures and to gather, represent, and interpret statistical data while engaging in an enjoyable, cooperative, interdisciplinary activitiy (NCTM 1989).
Literacy and informed decision making in an uncertain world require the ability to reason statistically. However, research indicates that, although conceptions of statistics and probability have steadily advanced within scientific and mathematical communities, adults in mainstram American society cannot think probabilistically or statistically about important societal issues. This problem is addressed through implementation and evaluation of a novel statistics course for students who are teachers or are considering a career in teaching. The course is designed to help students use statistical concepts as tools for social reasoning within simulations of real-world problem situations. The course is unique because of its connections with the community and its commitment to achieving a high degree of authenticity through simulations of realistic social problem solving.
Mathematics anxiety has always maintained a central focus in the education literature. However, there has been a recent focus on "statistics anxiety" as experienced by undergraduates. This paper presents the development of an instrument that assesses "statistical anxiety" in psychology graduate students. This measure was administered to 10 students enrolled in a graduate statistics course in an effort to refine the measure via student feedback. The refined instrument could be used as a screening tool for psychology students prior to taking graduate--level statistics course work; Such evaluation can assist instructors in identifying remedial need or counseling intervention.
This paper reports some difficulties and strategies the students have in solving conditional probability problems with computer simulation. The difficulties are related to programming in the software used and with the trend of the relative frequencies graphic representation when the number of cases increases. The main strategy for estimation was taking the last value of the relative frequencies as the requested probability.
"IT" or "Internet Technology" is a rising star in distance education. With the rapid development of new technologies, educators around the world have more tools and greater out-reaching power than ever before. What are IT education and its associated technology? How can statistics education benefit from it? How do you teach a statistics course on-line and what are the unique advantages and disadvantages of teaching statistics through the net? This paper summarizes my experiences designing and teaching an elementary statistics web course and gives my answers to some of the previous questions. I will in this paper present the way the course was taught and how specifically some of the course content was delivered using the "WebCT"(WebCT) software. Additionally some pedagogical recommendations will be made.
Most people realise that Excel can be used to carry out statistical analyses of data but what is not so well known is that it provides an extremely flexible and versatile teaching tool for constructing computer demonstrations. In this paper we first show a number of pre-built Excel workbooks for demonstrating statistical ideas - these illustrate the range of things that can be achieved. Then we show that building such workbooks is quite easy by showing how to construct a useful computer demonstration "from scratch" in just a few minutes, starting with a blank workbook. The aims of the paper are to outline benefits of using Excel for teaching statistics and to encourage other teachers to experiment with their own demonstrations and ideas.