Teaching

  • This paper is concerned with a general education course in elementary statistics, a course which is open to students of all disciplines. This provides an interesting mix of student interests. Some of the students are very familiar with the use of technology, having personal computers in their homes which they use on a frequent basis. Other students have never touched a computer and suffer a great deal of anxiety at the mere thought of using this technology. The curriculum must be designed to appeal to both types of students.

  • A method is suggested to incorporate instruction in the concept and the application of power considerations into an applied statistics course. This is based on designing one table usable for a wide range of the type of statistical tests usually introduced in such a course.

  • In the last few years a new consensus on the nature of learning has begun to emerge, stimulated by research in the field that has come to be known as cognitive science. The emerging conception of learning has a direct bearing on how science and mathematics can be taught most effectively. I will sketch here a few examples of recent findings in cognitive science, many of which support the the intuition of our most thoughtful teachers.

  • The project for the teaching of elements of Probability and Statistics at the ages 11 - 14 which I intend to describe is the result of the work of the Didactic Research Group of Pavia (1), formed of 5 university researchers and about 20 in-service teachers. In this paper I will refer in particular to the Mathematical contents of our proposal. But in order to reach a good understanding of the proposed work I should like to stress that the classroom activity we propose should include these very important steps: the presentation of a problematic situation, the intuition and explanation of one or more solutions, the collective discussion, the generalization and sometimes the formalization of the results and finally, if it is possible, their use in interesting real-life applications.

  • Freudenthal (1982) has observed that Symmetry as a source of stochastic understanding is a virtually unknown and badly neglected intuitive and didactic tool. Saying this should be a platitude, but didacticians appear to be no faster learners than their students. In the teaching of probability three common aids which assume symmetry are frequently used: coins, dice and urns. This paper will discuss some aspects of children's understanding of the first two of these aids.

  • This paper describes a situation where systematic use is being made of data collected by students as part of a class project and advocates the wider use of such projects. The immediate learning benefits to the students involved in carrying out projects have been widely canvassed recently, and this paper reports some experiences with a particular type of project. Advantage is also taken of these projects as a source of material for problem-based learning in applied statistics at all levels, and some specific reasons for the potential importance of such material are advanced.

  • The p-value can be introduced with a coin flipping exercise. The instructor flips a coin ten times and has a student call each flip. The students record their thoughts after each flip. The instructor reports that the caller calls every flip correctly. In this exercise students intuitively reject a null hypothesis because the p-value is too small. Students are reassured to learn from this concrete example that they intuitively followed the logic of statistical inference before they studied statistics.

  • This article explores the use of multimedia in an introductory business statistics course through a new computer vehicle called Teacher 2000. Traditional educational processes are reviewed and reinterpreted in light of technological advances in computing, video, and software. These advances provide new opportunities to educators. To highlight the potential of a multimedia approach in statistics, an example is developed that explains how professors and students might interact and use this new technology. Software developed by one of the authors is used to showcase multimedia potential.

  • This article presents one point of view on what data analysis concepts should be taught, how to teach those concepts and why this emphasis is important.

  • In this paper, we describe how we use real data in the classroom and we identify characteristics of data sets that make them particularly good for teaching. We also identify advantages and disadvantages of this approach, and offer suggestions for overcoming the obstacles. In a separate section of this volume, we provide an annotated bibliography that lists several hundred primary and secondary data sources that teachers may use in their own courses.

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