Proceedings

  • This paper summarizes the thinking of 84 middle school mathematics students' about variability in three stochastics tasks that involve repeated trial. Differences in students' acknowledgement of variability were found, depending on whether the task was from a sampling environment, or a probability environment. Students' tended to neglect variability in the probability environment. We conjecture that the way that probability is normally introduced to students is part of the cause of this phenomenon.

  • In Kenya today statistics is taught at various levels in the education system to various degrees of coverage and sophistication. At secondary school level there are rudimentary elements of descriptive statistics and probability. In teachers colleges elements of descriptive statistics and statistical inference are taught to those taking mathematics as a major teaching subject in secondary school. In the universities, statistics is taught principally in departments of mathematics in science faculties; but statistics is also taught to students of commerce, economics sociology, education, engineering, agriculture and computer science. This paper reviews the curriculum in statistics, the teaching approaches, availability of qualified teaching staff, availability of teaching and learning resources and performance of students. Emphasis is on teaching of statistics at university level.

  • Statistics is taught as a core course in the Management programmes leading to the degree of Master of Business Administration (MBA) or an equivalent degree in various Universities and Management Institutes in India. As a part of this course, Probability Theory, and Probability distributions are covered. The students who are admitted to this course are drawn from various disciplines; their level of understanding of mathematical concepts is not uniform, and hence, introducing concepts of the above topics need very careful planning and execution. In this paper, we outline some approaches generally used in teaching these courses, and compare the effectiveness of these approaches. We propose the use of case-based approach to teach some of the basic concepts in Statistics. We also discuss a specific case problem and discuss how this case problem can be effectively used to introduce the concept of Probability and Probability distributions. This method has been found to be quite useful in teaching Statistics in Executive Development Programmes also.

  • Statistical education and general Mathematical education has changed in Argentina in the last decade. The same has happened in many other countries in the world because the need for students to have a satisfactory Statistical training is an important preoccupation in today's information society. Any citizen, not only scientists and technologists, needs to understand the information available. Although changes already exist in the secondary school Mathematics curriculum, the results are not visible in the university classroom where the students' knowledge of statistics or probability are almost none. This paper describes the results of a survey about the previous knowledge of Probability and Statistics in university students before a first and formal statistical course is carried out. The experience was made among students in the geographic area in Argentina namely Litoral area. We try to identify the reasons why teachers tend to teach descriptive Statistics only, a few elements of Probability and nothing of data analysis.

  • When the Federal Law of Education in Argentine (1994) changed the curriculum of schools, statistics contents were introduced in the initial level (from 3 to 5 years), in the E.G.B. (from 6 to 15 years) and in the Polimodal (from 15 to 18 years). It was necessary to prepare teachers in statistics as they never have this signature in their curriculum. In this paper I will show how all this process is taking place in Argentine. In the universities, it depends on the careers, but with the curriculum changes, the purpose is to introduce courses of statistics not only on the grade careers, but also in the masters courses.

  • Some examples from the teaching proposal, elaborated by us, for the subject "Statistical and Numerical Methods" (SNM) are presented. SNM is an optional course in the last year of High School in Galicia (Spain). More specifically, we are concerned with the introduction of some new concepts at this teaching level in the Galician education system, namely, Markov chains, statistical inference and time series.

  • This paper describes a website containing information on textbooks for the introductory, applied statistics course. After an explanation of the rationale for such a site it lists the general education and business and economics textbooks on the site followed by characteristics of each text on the site. It concludes with future possibilities for such a site.

  • The primary purpose of the study was to determine the extent to which the public examination test items in statistics reflect the syllabus aims and assessment objectives. In addition to this, the nature of responses of a group of final year secondary school students, to selected non-routine and routine items in statistics was also studied. The aims of the syllabus and assessment objectives as well as the suggested methodologies place emphasis on problem solving skills, discovery learning and application of learned concepts in real life situation where as examination items do not reflect these objectives. Students' responses to non-routine tasks too confirm their inability to handle anything that is not routine. Currently, certification is based on one shot examination, where items are routine in nature, which implies that teaching is geared towards preparing the students for the public examination. Certification, instead of depending on just one external examination, should move towards incorporating continuous assessment component thereby providing the opportunity to use projects and open - ended tasks as part of teaching and learning.

  • We report an experiment which involves teaching statistics at compulsory school in Italy (145 primary school teachers and 2130 pupils, 6-10 years old, living in six Italian regions from north to south, giving a total of 132 primary classes were involved) where we evaluate the different efficiency of two different methods of teaching: by Objectives or by Concepts. In this experiment the fact that both these approaches anticipated working with real data reflecting a phenomenon of daily life is of importance. For testing this hypothesis we used multidimensional permutation tests by non parametric combination of dependent tests. Overall the results show that the method by Objectives is better than the method by Concepts.

  • The teaching of probability is currently being reinforced in many countries, as it is visible from new curricular documents such as the NCTM Standards (2000), where the acquisition of a precise language in connection to chance and probability is considered to be a main learning goal. On the other hand, textbooks are an important resource for teachers who can find in these books ideas and activities to facilitate students' learning. In recent Spanish curricular documents (M.E.C., 1992) the teaching of probability is introduced at earlier ages with a teaching methodology based on simulation and experimentation. A main concern is children's progressive acquisition of a precise language in connection to chance and probability. This curriculum is not an exception, since we find similar concerns in curricular documents from other countries, such as the United Kingdom or the United States. On the other hand, when children are first taught probability, they have frequently used terms and expressions to refer to randomness, sometimes with a meaning different to what is usual in the mathematics classroom. All these reasons suggest the interest to carry out an empirical study to determine the specific language that about chance and probability is presented in the textbooks.

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