Few would question the assertion that the computer has changed the practice of statistics. Fewer still would argue with the claim that the computer, so far, has had little influence on the practice of teaching statistics; in fact, many still claim that the computer should play no significant role in introductory statistics courses. In this article, I describe principles that influenced the design of data analysis software we recently developed specifically for teaching students with little of no prior data analysis experience. I focus on software capabilities that should provide compelling reasons to abandon the argument still heard that introductions to statistics are only made more difficult by simultaneously introducing students to the computer and a new software tool. The micro-computer opens up to beginning students means of viewing and querying data that have the potential to get them quickly beyond technical aspects of data analysis to the meat of the activity: asking interesting questions and constructing plausible answers. The software I describe, DataScope, was designed as part of a 4-year project funded by the National Science Foundation to create materials and software for teaching data analysis at the high-school and introductory college level. We designed DataScope to fill gap we perceived between professional analysis tools (e.g., StatView and Data Desk), which were too complex for use in introductory courses, and existing educational software (e.g., Statistics Workshop, Data Insights) which were not quite powerful enough to support the kind of analyses we had in mind. Certainly, DataScope is not the educational tool we might dream of having (see Biehler, 1994), but it does give students easy access to considerable analysis power.
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