Journal Article

  • This article attempts to make a strong case for the use of Wiki to support collaborative learning experiences for students in the statistics classroom. Wiki is an innovative Website that allows all users to add and edit content with relative simplicity. Wiki features empowered learners and bottom-up organization that enable easy authoring of Web content, open access and unrestricted collaboration. We first introduce statistics as a collaborative discipline and therefore compatible with Wiki as a collaborative learning space. We then show evidence that collaboration can improve the learning of individuals in the statistics classroom as well as the whole class. Finally we demonstrate how Wiki can facilitate collaborative learning and bring about instructional change to improve student learning of statistics. We present several types of Wiki-based activities: collaborative writing, glossaries, discussion and review, statistical projects, self-reflective journals, and assessment.

  • Much of the computing that students do in introductory statistics courses is based on techniques that were developed before computing became inexpensive and ubiquitous. Now that computing is readily available to all students, instructors can change the way we teach statistical concepts. This article describes computational ideas that can support teaching George Cobb's Three Rs of statistical inference: Randomize, Repeat, Reject.

  • The author of this article reflects on the uses of technology in statistics education, comparing the state of the art as described in her article from 1992 with current developments. She reviews five categories of software: software that uses video as data, Geographical Information Systems, graph construction tools, systems with distribution and data manipulation capabilities, and probability generation tools. Considering how software has changed in the past fifteen years, the author argues that while remarkable technological progress has been made, many of the same pedagogical caveats apply as in 1992. These concerns are an integral part of studying the uses of technology as a learning tool in any content area, so it is important that we put them front and center as this journal begins and keep them there as it grows.

  • This article presents an overview of three undergraduate-level statistical consulting courses being taught at institutions of different size (small, medium, and large). Topics that will be discussed include the evolution of these courses, thoughts on what makes such courses successful, potential pitfalls to watch for, the necessary minimal skills students should have to be successful in the courses, and thoughts on where these courses should appear in a statistics curriculum. This paper will provide an overview of the similarities and differences in the way applied consulting courses are presented within the three undergraduate programs.

  • This paper refers to a graph called grapharti which I have developed. Grapharti is designed to organise and display large amounts of data obtained from surveys, opinion polls, course/teacher evaluations, sports and the stock market. The data are retrieved from a database and displayed on a web page. The purpose of this paper is to show that grapharti can encourage exploration of and facilitate insight into large amounts of data, and thus be used as a tool in statistical education. Users of grapharti are enticed to explore the data and this in turn results in reflection on the data. With the focus on the graph and the data, the user can visualise some statistical concepts in a new manner.

  • Studies have yielded highly mixed results as to differences in male and female student performance in statistics courses; the role that professors play in these differences is even less clear. In this paper, we consider the impact of professor and student gender on student performance in an introductory business statistics course taught by economics faculty. Using a sample of 535 students, we find, after controlling for academic and mathematical background, that students taught by a professor of the opposite gender fare significantly worse than students taught by a professor of the same gender. The presence of this gender effect highlights the importance of pursuing sound, gender-neutral pedagogical practices in introductory statistics education.

  • It is shown how student participation in a real consulting project can be leveraged to achieve the dual goals of (i) developing statistical consulting skills in graduate students, and (ii) enhancing the instructional effectiveness of statistical methodology. Achieving these goals is the primary mission of the Statistical Consulting Collaboratory at the University of California, Riverside. The paper gives a detailed illustration of the how the goals were achieved by reporting on an interesting case study, with special emphasis given to describing the involvement of students and the alternative ways in which the project found its way into classrooms

  • In the branch of probability called "large deviations," rates of convergence (e.g. of the sample mean) are considered. The theory makes use of the moment generating function. So, particularly for sums of independent and identically distributed random variables, the theory can be made accessible to senior undergraduates after a first course in stochastic processes. This paper describes a directed independent study in large deviations offered to a strong senior, providing a sample outline and discussion of resources. Learning points are also highlighted.

  • A novel assignment exercise is described, in which students use a dictionary to estimate the size of their vocabulary. This task was developed for an introductory statistics service course, although it can be modified for use in survey sampling courses. The exercise can be used to simultaneously assess a range of core statistics skills: sample size estimation, obtaining a simple random sample, estimating a sample proportion, measuring the sample error of this proportion, and similarly for a scalar multiple of a proportion. The outcome of this exercise involves the student discovering something about themself, which serves as a natural motivator and a tool for generating interest in the discipline of statistics.

  • This study investigated the factors that 12th grade students in the United Arab Emirates take<br>into consideration when judging the validity of a given statistical generalization, particularly, in terms of<br>the sample size and sample selection bias. The sample consisted of 360 students who had not studied<br>sampling yet. Results show that a small percentage of the students take the sample size and selection bias<br>into consideration properly. Many students based their judgment on their personal beliefs regardless of the<br>properties of the selected sample. This study identified some pre-teaching misconceptions that students<br>have with regard to sampling. Such misconceptions include 'any sample represents the population', and,<br>'any sample does not represent the population'.

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