Journal Article

  • The focus of this research is the concept of median, which has received scarce interest in previous research. We analyse the open responses given by 518 Mexican students from Educación Secundaria (Junior) and Bachillerato (Senior) Secondary Education to a problem involving the computation of median. Using some ideas from the onto-semiotic approach, we classify the responses, taking into account the central tendency measure used, and describe the students' semiotic conflicts. We use the chi-square test to study possible dependence between responses and students' group. We observe better results in computation in Educación Secundaria students but better competence to select the best representative value in Bachillerato students.

  • The Assessment Resource Tools for Improving Statistical Thinking (ARTIST) Web site was developed to provide high-quality assessment resources for faculty who teach statistics at the tertiary level but resources are also useful to statistics teachers at the secondary level. This article describes some of the numerous ARTIST resources and suggests ways teachers may use these assessment resources.

  • This article describes an interactive activity that revolves around the dice-based golf game GOLO. The activity illustrates descriptive statistics and graphical analyses for univariate data.

  • Showing simply how statistical thinking can help in weighing evidence and reaching decisions can be useful both as an introduction to an extended presentation of statistical theory and as an introduction to a looser discussion of the nature and value of data.

  • This article describes a fun activity that can be used to help students make links between statistical analyses and their real-world implications. Although an illustrative example is provided using analysis of variance, the activity may be adapted for use with other statistical techniques.

  • This article describes an interactive way to help students learn to evaluate central tendency measures using a fictional story. The use of humour and fictional dire consequences may increase student understanding and engagement while reducing anxiety.

  • This article describes how a demonstration of statistical (or other) software can be recorded without expensive video equipment and saved as a presentation to be displayed with software such as Microsoft PowerPoint. Work carried out on a tablet PC, for example, can also be recorded in this fashion

  • Using sequences of coin flips as a model of serial independent events, we asked schoolchildren in grades 1 through 5 to estimate the likelihood of the next flip. Most children in each grade expected short patterns to continue.

  • The book If the World Were a Village, by David J. Smith, is the context for analysing and creating graphs of the world's demographic information. Students examine numerical information regarding the more than six billion world inhabitants by imagining the world's population as 100 people.

  • We present a simple card game whose payout depends on a player's strategy, as well as on chance. Solutions require the use of conditional analysis and the computation of expected values.

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