Summary This article illustrates many of the problems of defining and obtaining a 'representative' sample in the context of a real-life survey of train performance.
Summary This article illustrates many of the problems of defining and obtaining a 'representative' sample in the context of a real-life survey of train performance.
Summary This article discusses optimal strategies for contestants in a well-known television game show. [
Summary The Family Expenditure Survey provides details of household incomes. This article looks at income distribution afresh and what is meant by the mean.
This article draws analogies between the activities of statisticians and of chefs. It suggests how these analogies can be used in teaching, both to help understanding of what statistics is about and to increase motivation to learn the subject.
This article describes an interactive activity for illustrating general properties of confidence intervals and the construction of confidence intervals for proportions. In completing this activity, students generate, collect and analyse data.
Proposes methods of introducing an individual element into the formative assessment of the ability to use computer software in the study of statistics. Diagrammatic representations of data; Correlation and regression exercises.
This article shows how data from a television game show can be used as a basis for illustrating many statistical procedures.
Describes a set of Minitab macros that perform randomization and bootstrap versions of basic statistical techniques. Content of the macros; Use of the macros for teaching; Example.
A bag of 24 packets of a well-known brand of crisps provides a handy visual (and edible) aid to looking at the syllabus of a basic course in statistics.
ProbLab is a probability-and-statistics unit developed at the Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling, Northwestern University. Students analyze the combinatorial space of the 9-block, a 3-by-3 grid of squares, in which each square can be either green or blue. All 512 possible 9-blocks are constructed and assembled in a ?bar chart? poster according to the number of green squares in each, resulting in a narrow and very tall display. This combinations tower is the same shape as the normal distribution received when 9-blocks are generated randomly in computer-based simulated probability experiments. The resemblance between the display and the distribution is key to student insight into relations between theoretical and empirical probability and between determinism and randomness. The 9-block also functions as a sampling format in a computer-based statistics activity, where students sample from a ?population? of squares and then input and pool their guesses as to the greenness of the population. We report on an implementation of the design in two Grade 6 classrooms, focusing on student inventions and learning as well as emergent classroom socio-mathematical behaviors in the combinations-tower activity. We propose an application of the 9-block framework that affords insight into the Central Limit Theorem in science.