Conference Paper

  • Statistical literacy should be a key goal in preparing students to understand statistical information which is often reported in the media. This research is centred on the teaching of a specially designed unit of work on statistical literacy to ninety Year 10 (14-year-old) high school students that emphasised media reports both in the teaching approach and in the pre- and post- assessments. The students' test responses were analysed using the SOLO taxonomy framework for assessment and results were compared to those in previous studies. The issues that arose in the development of the teaching unit, the preliminary results on changes in levels of statistical literacy observed, and the factors that could affect the development of statistical literacy, such as mathematical and English ability, are briefly reported. The students' and teachers' reactions to the unit of instruction using media reports are also discussed.

  • The widespread international adoption of DNA technology in forensic science over the last twenty years or so has resulted in some standardised methods of data collection and data interpretation. The impetus generated by the systematic approach characteristic of forensic DNA has carried into other fields of forensic science, typically resulting in forensic scientists wondering whether the same approaches can be applied to their own specialisms. Workers in areas of forensic interest such as ballistics and trace evidence have for some time collected in a systematic manner data connected with those fields. However there are many more areas of forensic science which require large bodies of systematically collected data. Some of these areas are so rarely used in forensic science that the required data is not available, and for a few areas of evidence it is infeasible, if not impossible to collect suitable data.

  • Over the last decade, the use of real world projects in introductory statistics courses has increased in popularity. Real world projects provide students with an opportunity to learn the entire process of a statistical investigation. Such projects fit the principles of active learning well. However, due to the time and effort required by both the instructor and students, it is difficult to sustain the project activity for a long time period. Hence, the final project reports are often disappointing. Through an NSF funded project, we have constructed a real-time online database. Students collect their own data and enter it into the database. Various activities are now available at http://stat.cst.cmich.edu/statact/. We assign group projects using the data collected by the students themselves. This paper shares how the process of statistical investigation is implemented into the project by using the students' own data.

  • Modern teaching methods require students to be active participants in the learning process. Assigning projects to students sets a frame which cultivates the interactivity between the instructor and the students and motivates the students to explore the field. The objective of this paper is to present the results from the use of individual directed projects in the introductory statistics course at the Department of Political Sciences of Aristotle, University of Thessaloniki. We compare this group with another group of students who were taught the introductory statistics course with conventional methods. The results indicate that students in the project-based group grasped statistical concepts and ideas at a higher rate than students in the control group, had a better attitude towards statistics, and did not think that statistics is as hard to learn as students in the other group.

  • Piaget's constructivism and its further developments are used as the conceptual framework to relate, in the learning process, students' age with specific topics in probability and statistics. Such a perspective consists of opposing the notion of chance to that of a reversible sequence and, therefore, to causality. Nevertheless, when the contributions to probability theory developed during the 17th to the 19th centuries are considered, it can be noticed that the concept of chance is a characterization of "our ignorance of the causal chain." This fact motivates two questions which are discussed in this manuscript. The first one consists of understanding what constitutes the breaking-off between Cournot's viewpoint of probability and the traditional one. The second question consists of exploring what kind of probability and statistics teaching would be developed if the traditional viewpoint on chance and probability is considered.

  • In this paper we sketch the history and the philosophy of statistics and probability theory and the connections to its political aspects. Knowledge of the cultural embeddedness of statistics and probability theory is an added value in the teaching thereof. The use of statistics and probability is a phenomenon with which everyone is confronted on a daily basis. Beside literacy, numeracy is an important challenge for education. In order to succeed in this task, the traditional curriculum (technique-oriented and individual, competition-oriented) will need to be sacrificed for a curriculum in which there is room for the cultural aspects of statistics and probability theory. For this purpose, cooperative learning is a didactic entry which is suitable for interaction and critical input of pupils.

  • We seek to carry out a comparison of the diverse characteristics that are presented in the teaching and learning of Statistics in different university careers. We will compare the Statistics curriculum that are developed in each degree program, the objectives that are pursued, the different didactic methods that are used in each case, the applications used, the work with computer and other simulation instruments and the types of problems that receive larger emphasis in each discipline. From the student's point of view, we are carrying out an investigation that is in a first exploratory phase which will help us to describe the prior knowledge that the students bring when beginning their first statistic course, in connection with the intuitive interpretation of simple statistical graphics, such as graphics of bars and sectors, and interpretation of charts of frequencies.

  • Statistics Education (SE) is a relatively new field of knowledge production that has rapidly evolved during the last decade. An indication of this development is the large amount of information available in the proceedings of professional meetings such as ICOTS. However, it is also a fact that only a small part of Statistics Education activities are disseminated in the Spanish language. This reduces the possibilities for Spanish speaking professors and researchers to be informed about results and advances in the field. Hipotesis Alternativa (HA), or Alternative Hypothesis, an electronic bulletin established in 2000, has been created to try to fulfill that need. The bulletin has been of great help for statistics educators in Spanish-Speaking countries. This paper presents an overview of HA accomplishments and some ideas as to the changes that could be made to improve this bulletin.

  • In this paper I summarize my 25 years of research on teaching and learning statistics, as I participated in the emergence of statistics education as a research discipline. This summary and reflection are presented through stories of research projects I have been involved in, all of which involved collaborations with colleagues who have made important contributions to the research and from whom I have learned many important lessons. I summarize and reflect on three interconnected areas of research: synthesizing and building on research studies across diverse disciplines, developing and using good assessment instruments to evaluate and improve student learning, and studying the role of technological tools in developing students' reasoning about specific concepts.

  • In recent years there has been increased attention within both the research and teaching communities of mathematics education to using student work and student thinking to obtain clues about how students develop and construct their mathematical knowledge. Teachers and researchers in statistics education have also begun to look more closely at student work and student thinking on statistics tasks, in order to gain better insights into what their students know about statistical concepts. In this plenary talk I will share some excerpts of Grade 6 - 12 students' thinking and reasoning on several statistical tasks that were designed to probe for students' understandings of variability in data sets and in distributions. Task based interviews on data sets presented to our students in both graphical and tabular form that can provide us with roadmaps to for curriculum decisions to enrich our students' statistical growth whatever their level may be.

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