Literature Index

Analysis of the curricula for primary schools in England and Brazil indicates that in both countries while there is emphasis given in policy documents to the importance of problem solving, the materials that are designed to support teachers' implementation of the curriculum in their classrooms reflects a more passive approach to the teaching of graphing. We draw on research evidence from studies with primary school children and with student teachers to argue for the importance of active use of graphing for the emergence of transparency (Meira, 1998). We discuss the implications for initial teacher education in order to support teachers whose own confidence and experience in statistics is very limited.

Technology has transformed the modern introductory statistics course, but little is known about how students develop the skills required to use this technology. This study compares two different training approaches for learning to operate statistical software packages. Guided training (GT) uses direct instruction and explicit guidance during training, whereas active-exploratory training types, such as error-management training (EMT), promote self-directed exploration. Previous studies in general software training suggest that EMT outperforms GT at promoting adaptive skill transfer. This study recruited a sample of 115 psychology students enrolled in introductory statistics courses that ran concurrently across two campuses. These students completed weekly, one-hour training sessions learning to use the statistical package SPSS. In the final week of the semester, students completed an SPSS certification task to measure adaptive skill transfer. The EMT and GT approach was implemented in Campus A and B respectively. Due to non-random allocation, the covariates of gender, personal access, statistical knowledge, and training progress were taken into account when modeling adaptive transfer between training approaches. After controlling for these covariates, no difference in adaptive transfer was found between training approaches. The results suggest that improving access to statistical packages may provide a more powerful way to improve the development of technological skills over using different training approaches.

Conducting inference is a cornerstone upon which the practice of statistics is based. As such, a large portion of most introductory statistics courses is focused on teaching the fundamentals of statistical inference. The goal of this study is to make a formal comparison of learning outcomes under the traditional and simulation-based inference curricula. A randomized experiment was conducted to administer the two curricula to students in an introductory statistics course. Students of the simulation-based curriculum were found to have improved learning outcomes on topics in statistical inference; however, a clear violation of between-student independence due to group administration of curriculum treatments casts considerable doubt on the statistical significance of these results. A simulation study is used to demonstrate the volatility of Type I error rates in educational studies where classroom level covariance structures exist by comparisons are made on the student level.

Children (preschoolers and third-, and sixth-grade pupils) were asked to choose out of 2 sets of marbles of 2 colors the set which they believed offered more chances of drawing a marble of a given color. It was found that a short instruction enabled the third-grade Ss to make their correct decisions, as did the sixth-graders, through a comparison of quantitative ratios. Reprinted from Child Development 41 (1970), 377 - 389.