The power of computing technology has increased at an astounding rate in the last decade. Today, the personal computer plays a key role in most introductory statistics courses, freeing students from "computational drudgery" as well as enabling a sharper instructional focus on data analysis and the interpretation of statistical results. Computers have also come to play an important role in teaching statistical concepts through simulations. Despite the increased popularity of computer-based statistical simulations, there have been few empirical evaluations of their effectiveness. In this paper, I describe and evaluate three computer-assisted simulations developed for use with SPSS and Microsoft Excel. The simulations are designed to reinforce and enhance students' understanding of sampling distributions, confidence intervals, and significance tests. Results of the evaluation reveal that these simulations can help improve students' comprehension of some of the most difficult material they encounter in the introductory social statistics course.
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