ConStatS is used in almost all the discipline-specific introductory statistics courses taught at Tufts. Even though most students seem able to use the software for an extended period of time without a great deal of direction, most of the instructors provide assignments that provoke open-ended use of the software. These assignments usually contain short essay questions that address the kinds of conceptual issues captured in ConStatS experiments. During the past year, ConStatS has been at the center of a large scale, FIPSE funded project for evaluating the effectiveness of curricular software. The goal of the evaluation was to assess if ConStatS in particular, and curricular software in general, could help students to develop a deeper conceptual understanding of statistics. The evaluation tool place in the fall 1992 and the spring 1993 semesters. Classes at three universities participated. In total, seven classes with 303 students participated as control groups.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education