Statistics has not been a part of the typical liberal arts curriculum. After an examination of some central features of both liberal arts education and statistics, it is argued that statistics can play a strong role in liberal arts education, in part because of the advances that have taken place in computer technology.
Subjects were asked to select from among four possible sequences the "most likely" to result from flipping a coin five times. Contrary to the results of Kahneman and Tversky(1972), the majority of subjects (72%) correctly answered that the sequences are equally likely to occur. This result suggests, as does performance on similar NAEP items, that most secondary school and college-age students view successive outcomes of a random process as independent.
Thirty-nine statisticians gathered for a workshop on statistical education in Iowa City, IA, June 18-20, 1990. I attempt here to capture some of our thoughts on statistical education.
This article discusses the piece "Psychological conceptions of randomness".
The paper analyzes the relationship between the epistemological nature of mathematical knowledge and its socially constituted meaning in classroom interaction.
Previous research indicated that subjects are not very surprised when reading coincidence stories, apparently because they regard the coincidence as one of many events that could have happened. This was true with respect to coincidences written by somebody else. However, there were indications that subjects found their own coincidences more surprising than those of others. The present study examines that egocentric bias and explores it further .
This analysis extends to the problem of the definition of the statistical experiment and the sample-space enumerating its outcomes.
This study presents a series of experiments showing that it is possible to elicit judgments indicating that perceived sample accuracy increases with sample size.
This article discusses the affect of weighted average.
A series of probabilistic inference problems is presented and base rates will be combined with other information when the two kinds of information are perceived as being equally relevant to the judged case. The base-rate fallacy is then discussed in its relation to the above.