Literature Index

This is the final report of "A Program to Improve Quantitative Literacy in the Schools," a three-year project of the American Statistical Association (ASA) with assistance from NCTM completed the final year of development on September 30, 1987. This Final Project Report is submitted in compliance with regulations issued by the National Science Foundation. The purpose of this Final Project Report is to provide educators and other interested readers with a technical summary of the activities and to document the performance of the Quantitative Literacy (QL) Project. The report includes an Introduction, an Executive Summary, four main Sections, and an Appendix. The first section lists publications that address the activities of the project and provides impressions and points of view from numerous writers. The next section presents a list of individuals who assisted with the project. This list includes co-investigators, evaluators, programmers, and others associated with Quantitative Literacy. The third and most extensive section provides a technical description of the project and the project results. The final section contains materials produced by the project, some that were specifically required in the award document and others that were developed because they were considered to be useful to the project. The section is composed of reports, summaries, statements, forms, guidelines, and diagrams and charts regarding the activities of the project.

Project work has been implemented in the assessment of the final year students in a University Business School. The main objective of the project is to develop students' research skills. Although the project is not necessarily a statistical project, many of these projects involve data analysis. Hence, statistics has become a substantial part of the exercise. However, students have limited understanding in statistics and research methods, thus the main concern is whether they equip themselves in data analysis and what difficulties they encounter while handling data. The paper gives an overview of experience in data analysis for these students. The study is based on a survey conducted amongst the final year students upon completion of their projects. Students' views of data analysis were assessed. Conclusions were drawn in terms of the results, and positive and negative experiences of the students. The strengths and weaknesses of the data analysis are identified. Ways to improve the statistics curriculum and assist students to master the statistical skills in data analysis in future are discussed.

Over the past twenty years much has been written about the introductory or service course in statistics. Historically, this course has been viewed as difficult and unpleasant by many students and frustrating and unrewarding to teach by many instructors. Dissatisfactions with the introductory course have led people to suggest new models for the course, to lead workshops to reexamine this course (Hogg 1992), and to offer recommendations for how the course should be changed (Cobb 1992). This paper presents the results of a survey of teachers of the first statistics course, to determine the impact of reform efforts on the teaching of statistics. Suggestions and guidelines for teaching these courses are offered, based on the results of the survey.

This article is based on the mark-recapture activity (capture-recapture). We will (1) document how considering solutions approaches led students (and instructors) to discover a problem inherent in this approach, (2) examine approaches to pooling results from multiple cases, (3) highlight the differences between the framed mathematical problem and the actual practice of ecologists, and (4) propose two sampling activity formats that teachers can choose on the basis of their goals for students. These two formats allow students to mathematically contrast two approaches to handling data or to provide a real-world simulation.