Journal Article

  • This article describes the design, implementation, and assessment of four hands-on activities in an introductory college statistics course. In the activities, students investigated the ideas of the central limit theorem, confidence intervals, and hypothesis testing. Five assessments were administered to the students, one at the beginning and end of the course, and three in between the activities. We found that, despite our attempts to engage our students in active reflection, their performance on the assessments generally did not improve. These results raise important issues about the design of pedagogical tools and activities as well as the need to gather data to assess their effectiveness.

  • Despite the appeal of Bayesian methods in health research, they are not widely used. This is partly due to a lack of courses in Bayesian methods at an appropriate level for non-statisticians in health research. Teaching such a course can be challenging because most statisticians have been taught Bayesian methods using a mathematical approach, and this must be adapted in order to communicate with non-statisticians. We describe some of the examples we used whilst teaching a course in Bayesian methods to a group of health research methodologists.

  • In recent years, statistics education in China has made great strides. However, there still exists a fairly large gap with the advanced levels of statistics education in more developed countries. In this paper, we identify some existing problems in statistics education in Chinese schools and make some proposals as to how they may be overcome. We hope that our study can benefit the development of statistics education in China, and encourage statistics educators and researchers in other countries to help address these important issues in China and possibly in other developing countries.

  • This paper describes two innovative online introductory statistics courses that utilize technology to create unique interactive learning environments. In these courses, technology is used to enable students to collaborate and learn from each other, in addition to learning from required course materials and the instructor. Technology is also introduced into the courses as a way to better illustrate important statistical concepts and provide students with tools to describe and analyze data. In this paper, special attention is paid to the way in which the GAISE recommendations have been implemented in one key component of the online courses: small-group discussion. Evaluative data gathered from students is used to describe how students perceive the discussion component of the courses, as well as how desired learning outcomes are being achieved. The paper concludes with a discussion of lessons learned from teaching an online statistics course, and implications for future development of online staiststics courses.

  • The surprising property of many data sets that their first significant digits follow Benford's Law provides examples that can pique and hold students' interest. Several ideas for student activities are presented.

  • We explain how to simulate both univariate and bivariate raw data sets having specified values for common summary statistics. The first example illustrates how to 'construct' a data set having prescribed values for the mean and the standard deviation - for a one-sample t test with a specified outcome. The second shows how to create a bivariate data set with a specified correlation coefficient.

  • Computational formulae are a throwback to a time when computers were not widely available. Today their teaching obscures important underpinnings of statistical theory and practice.

  • This article argues that the Normal distribution is often not a good model for anthropomorphic data.

  • The Internet offers a huge array of teaching resources for statistics. Here we present a selection of engaging Web-based tools, ranging from class surveys to individual simulation experiments.

  • The use of the Internet as a teaching tool continues to grow in popularity at colleges and universities. We consider, from the students' perspective, the use of an Internet approach compared to a lecture and lab-based approach for teaching an introductory course in statistical methods. We conducted a survey of introductory statistics students. Contradictory to what was hypothesized by the authors, they favoured keeping the lecture and lab-based approach for teaching the class.

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