Journal Article

  • Subjects for this study were graduate students enrolled in inferential statistics classes at a midwestern university. The study was conducted to determine the importance of spatial ability, attitudes toward mathematics, mathematical background, masculinity-femininity of interest pattern, attitudes toward feminist issues, student sex, and verbal and mathematical ability as predictors of achievement in applied statistics courses for male and female students. Regression analyses were performed comparing full versus restricted models. The amount of variance in statistics achievement accounted for in the full model which included all the previously mentioned sets of predictor variables was .60. The most important predictor variable set was attitudes toward feminist issues (reduction in R-sqr = .1861). Sex-related differences were found on all variable sets except verbal and mathematical ability.

  • According to the representativeness heuristic, the probability that an element is an exemplar of a given class is judged to be high to the extent that the element is representative of the class with respect to its salient features. In three experiments involving situations previously called upon in support of representativeness theory, questionnaire responses from 265 university students demonstrated systematic biases that deviated sharply from the obvious predictions of the theory. One such bias, the students' misinterpretation of proportion information as absolute-number information, is comparable to Piaget's concrete operations. The implications of representativeness theory are discussed in terms of the theory's relationship to concrete thinking, the importance of task characterisitcs, and the difficulty of a priori specification of the salient features with respect to which representativenss is assessed.

  • This article describes actitivies that can be used to teach elementary school students about the concept of the arithmetic mean.

  • Several activities at the 1989 Joint Statistical Meetings highlighted the contributions of women to the field of statistics. These activities are summarized, and selected profiles of women statisticans that were part of a display on women are featured.

  • In this study, a number of learner variables that are related to mathematics achievement in actual learning situations were examined. The dynamic model of the learning process as developed by Boekaerts was taken as a starting point. Both trait-like self-referenced cognitions (viz., academic self-concept of mathematics ability, goal orientations, and attribution style) and situation-specific variables were included. In a group of 8th graders (ages 11-12; N=186), marked differences between boys and girls on a mathematics test were found. These differences were parallelled by differences in both trait-like self-referenced cognitions and task-specific appraisals. It is concluded that boys experience learning situations where they are confronted with a mathematics test in a more positive way than girls do.

  • The purpose of this article is to describe what fourth graders can do when they are encouraged to invent their own ways of getting the average. The article also shows the teacher's active role in constructivist teaching.

  • This article discusses the use of data to "simulate" sampling from a population. The authors claim that their approach, termed "resampling", offers a powerful heuristic for solving statistical problems.

  • It is proposed that several biases in social judgment result from a failure--first noted by Francis Bacon--to consider possibilities at odds with beliefs and perceptions of the moment. Individuals who are induced to consider the opposite, therefore, should display less bias in social judgment. In two separate but conceptually parallel experiments, this reasoning was applied to two domains--biased assimilation of new evidence on social issues and biased hypothesis testing of personality impressions. Subjects were induced to consider the opposite in two ways: through explicit instructions to do so and through stimulus materials that made opposite possibilities more salient. In both experiments the induction of a consider-the-opposite strategy had greater corrective effect than more demand-laden alternative instructions to be as fair and unbiased as possible. The results are viewed as consistent with previous research on perseverance, hindsight, and logical problem solving, and are thought to suggest an effective method of retraining social judgment.

  • One key goal of adult literacy education is to empower students and enable them to become more informed citizens. This numeracy column focuses on a critical but often neglected aspect of what becoming an informed citizen entails. That aspect involves developing students' statistical literacy skills.

  • Five studies examined Kahneman and Miller's (1986) hypothesis that events become more "normal" and generate weaker reactions the more strongly they evoke representations of similar events. In each study, Ss were presented with 1 of 2 versions of a scenario that described the occurrence of an improbable event. The scenarios equated the a priori probability of the target event, but manipulated the ease of mentally simulating the event by varying the absolute number of similar events in the population. Depending on the study, Ss were asked to indicate whether they thought the event was due to chance as opposed to (a) an illegitimate action on the part of the benefited protagonist, or (b) the intentional or unintentional misrepresenation of the probability of the event. As predicted, the fewer ways the events could have occurred by chance, the less inclined Ss were to assume that the low-probability event occurred by chance. The implications of these findings for impression-management dynamics and stereotype revision are discussed.

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