Proceedings

  • XLStatistics is a set of Excel workbooks for analysis of data that has the various analysis tools and methods organized according to the number and type of variables involved. Most introductory courses in statistics start out with a discussion of the different types of variables, but very few data analysis packages are organized along these lines. This can make it difficult for students, and may be a contributing reason for the common "What test do I use?" question. We describe the XLStatistics package and show how it may help to overcome some of the common problems encountered by students.

  • Line diagrams may assist statistical understanding, but a colourful animated interactive version may be even better. Modern software, in particular Microsoft Excel, now makes it easy to build such live figures. The author describes live figures and presents examples in the context of promoting understanding and use of confidence intervals. Interface design principles and expertise in statistical education should be combined to develop effective live figures. Animation, multiple representations, engagement through interactivity, and vivid 'take-home' images can all be valuable. Investigation of how best to design live figures and use them with journal papers and books should prove educationally valuable.

  • This paper explores the reasons why technology has not been used extensively in New Zealand secondary schools and why changes are now starting to take place. It discusses why Microsoft Excel is a useful tool in the solution of statistical problems and why it is the ideal tool to use in secondary school statistics. A software package, written in Visual Basic, has been developed to augment the teaching of Year 13 Mathematics with Statistics. This software package, called OG Statistics, interacts with Microsoft Office and is designed to encourage the use of Excel in solving statistics problems. A number of worked examples are given that show students how to solve a problem and encourages them to experiment. Practice problems are then provided with worked solutions. When students feel ready to work independently they can attempt the self-assessment modules. This also indicates whether they have reached a reasonable level of competency. The package can be incorporated into a lesson or used as a revision aid for the self-paced learner. The software package also incorporates a number of educational principles including constructivism and scaffolded learning.

  • Although the use of a statistical computer package has become an integral part of modern statistics courses, the primary goal of traditional software has been to do statistics rather than to learn statistics. Fathom: Dynamic Statistics Software is one of several newly developed packages that focus a greater emphasis on providing an atmosphere in which students can investigate statistical concepts. To facilitate learning, a key premise is that all aspects of an analysis are linked so that students can see how changes in one area are reflected in another. Fathom's developers have made a special effort to produce an intuitive interface that allows students to "drag & drop" to construct analyses from basic building blocks. It also provides a convenient environment for instructors to develop effective demonstrations. We give examples of these sorts of dynamic illustrations and discuss how Fathom can be used to encourage student explorations.

  • Constructivism is a philosophy that supports student construction of knowledge. Since students uniquely construct their knowledge, instructional strategies that support constructivist philosophies naturally advocate student understanding. Instructional trends in the mathematics and statistics education communities support the active-learning orientation of constructivist philosophy. I posit that, while not the only philosophy of teaching and learning, constructivism is one of the best such philosophies. One question remains: "How do instructional strategies that support student knowledge construction address the needs of all students?" I first examine learning styles in general, then enumerate a collection of instructional strategies that support constructivism, and conclude with an analysis of how instructional strategies that support constructivism address the needs of the learning styles previously examined.

  • This project was a quasi-experiment designed to investigate whether three factors influence student performance in Quantitative Techniques: (a) the attitude of students towards Quantitative Techniques as a service subject, (b) English language ability of students, and (c) Mathematical ability of students. The results show deficiencies in students' competencies with respect to both language and mathematical ability. The overall impression of the students is that their mathematical ability is the major problem.

  • This paper presents the results of a pilot study investigating the use of short stories in teaching introductory statistics to positively affect statistical anxiety and attitudes toward statistics. The Statistics Anxiety Rating Scale (STARS) and the Attitude Toward Statistics (ATS) scale were given to 17 graduate students at the beginning and end of the semester course. Results suggest a significant decline in statistical anxiety and a positive change in attitudes toward statistics courses, but no significant change in negative attitudes toward the field of statistics.

  • In this article, we exam students' motivations and expectations in introductory statistics. An interview study was conducted to investigate student motivations and expectations before taking the introductory statistics course. The study was conducted in four different types of institutions. Interviews were conducted two to three months after completing an introductory statistics course. Interviewees were chosen to represent the grade distribution by selecting three students from each grade level of A, B, and C or lower. Students' motivations are analyzed and classified into five types based on the existing motivation theories. Four scenarios that commonly occur in introductory statistics are analyzed using existing motivation frameworks. It is suggested that learning goals, instructor's expectation of students, and instructor's caring for student's learning progress are important strategies for motivations.

  • The studies we present investigate elementary students' reasoning about distributions in two contexts: (a) measurement and (b) naturally occurring variation. We first summarize an investigation in which fourth-graders measured the heights of a variety of objects and phenomena, including the school's flagpole, a pencil, and several launches of model rockets. Students noted that the measurements were distributed and that sources of error corresponded to differences in qualities of distribution, especially spread. Next, students investigated the distributions of measurements of height for rockets of different design, to learn whether and how they could be confident that rockets with rounded nose cones "really" went higher than those with pointed nose cones. We then turn to the naturally-occurring variation context, in which these same students (now fifth-graders) studied the growth of Wisconsin Fast Plants(tm), fast-growing members of the Brassica family that enable multiple cycles of classroom observation and experiment within a school year (life cycle is about 40 days). We recount how students became adept at using changing shapes of distributions to support plausible accounts of growth processes. Questions about what would be likely to happen "if we grew them again" motivated investigations of sampling, which, in turn, suggested choices of statistics to represent a sample distribution. Finally, students invented means for considering how one might know whether two different distributions of measures could reasonably be considered "really different."

  • This paper provides an analysis of a Teacher Development Experiment (Simon, 2000) designed to support teachers' understandings of statistical data analysis. The experiment addresses the following research question: Can the results from research conducted in a middle-grades mathematics classroom be used to guide teachers' learning? In both cases, activities from an instructional sequence designed to support the development of ways to reason statistically about data were the basis of engagement. Analyses of the episodes in this paper document that the learning trajectory that emerged from the teachers' activity did, in many significant ways, parallel that of the students.

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