Literature Index

In the recent past, qualitative research methods have become more prevalent in the field of <br><br>statistics education. This paper offers thoughts on the process of framing a qualitative study by <br><br>means of an illustrative example. The decisions that influenced the framing of a study of preservice teachers  understanding of the concept of statistical sample are explained by describing <br><br>the goals, knowledge, and beliefs brought to the research project. Each framing decision is <br><br>portrayed as a function of these three overarching cognitions. It is suggested that mapping one s <br><br>goals, knowledge, and beliefs while framing and carrying out a qualitative study can be useful <br><br>for maintaining the quality of the stud

In this article, we analyze interactive processes through which research groups and their statistical advisors insert new (for researchers) statistical concepts into existing research practice. Through processes of talk-in-interaction (speaking, gesture, and inscription), they assemble specimens, research workers, devices, algorithms, and texts, in alternative representations of future work. Alternate assemblies are compared, edited, and projected into future activity, in clients' projects and in publications, where they are viewed over a longer project history. As achievements of local interaction, assemblies have an interactive structure that builds from, and contrasts with, accounts of historically prior practice, involves joint imagination of new combinations of human judgment, with technology (e.g., statistical algorithms), and includes deliberate efforts to evaluate and edit future work activity. Speakers animate orders of work as laminar, narrative structures that deploy time, place, and human/technical agency in consequentially different ways. These alternative assemblies are produced during conversations in which client research projects have been disrupted or suspended in the hope of finding a better way to work in the future. In this sense, learning about new technical concepts that will be realized at a collective level of analysis is anticipated and given structure in local processes of interaction. We conclude with a discussion of how technical concepts are extended in scope and meaning as they are distributed through work organization.

The World Wide Web (WWW) is a tool that can be used in many ways for basic statistics education. Using the latest WWW technology, educators can now include interactive demonstrations in the form of Java applets within their WWW materials. Six example applets developed by the authors are introduced and discussed. Suggestions for class are made, and instructions for incorporating the applets within a WWW document are given

This paper discusses a set of programs written in the statistical package Stata that is designed to support interactive student tutorials. The tutorial package has several desirable features, including customized tutorials, full student interaction, checking of student answers, repetition of practice problems using randomly chosen values, and a simple way to gauge student comprehension even when students run the tutorials at home. As an example, a tutorial used in an undergraduate econometrics class is discussed. The example illustrates Monte Carlo experiments on the linear regression model that allow students to demonstrate the validity of various formulas for the sampling distribution of ordinary least squares estimators.