Literature Index

In the May 2009 issue of The American Statistician, Brown and Kass (BK) offered thought-provoking answers to the question "What is Statistics?" which have direct implications for statistics education. For five years, St. Olaf College's Center for Interdisciplinary Research's (CIR) activities have aligned with BK in both philosophy and practice. We describe the program's motivation and design, how we recruit students and find faculty collaborators with suitable projects, and how the teams of faculty and students work together. A research skills seminar series parallels the research process and prepares students for working on teams. Inevitably, administrative issues arose which we identify and address. Landes (2009) identified significant issues related to recruiting. Our model of undergraduate education has proved to be fruitful on this front. Sending nearly 50 students to graduate school in five years from a college of fewer than 3000 speaks to the program's efficacy. Here we present a program based on authentic interdisciplinary research with undergraduates which embodies many of BK's ideas and addresses recruiting issues. Although this experience underscores the potential for new and exciting approaches to statistics education in the liberal arts environment, the model itself can be adapted by a variety of undergraduate programs. Supplemental materials are available online.

Presents a simple model of generative learning that permits the definition of 4 kinds of interactions (scaffolding, investigation, reformulation, and navigation) and a system for tracing and recording how students use educational technology. This model will maintain a link between interaction and learning, thus providing one method for the assessment of a wide range of educational technology environments. Two results are presented from an evaluation of ConStatS, a program for teaching conceptual understanding of probability and statistics, in which 659 college students participated. Both results focus on a specific interaction that correlates with increased learning, and on the general patterns of interaction that characterize students who execute the interactions. (PsycLIT Database Copyright 1996 American Psychological Assn, all rights reserved)

Although the inquiry process is a foundational practice in statistics, it is rarely taught in school. This paper introduces a tentative model to describe primary teachers' evolving experiences in learning to teach statistical inquiry.

This paper describes a National Science foundation (NSF) Sponsored Teacher Enhancement Program (TEP) in statistics during the years 1991 - 1994 conducted at the University of Puerto Rico. The project evolved from the belief that statistics is more meaningful to students when they plan, experiment, collect and analyze data themselves rather than when they learn a set of formulas and techniques. This idea was first incorporated locally in an NSF Sponsored Young Scholars Program in statistics during the period 1989 - 1991 in which the author worked with talented students from high schools in the region. The experience and success of the Young Scholars Program and the education department's request to expand it led to the TEP in statistics presented herein. There are three special features of this project. The first feature is to introduce the modern method of teaching statistical reasoning to students primarily through the use of examples and class projects which are interesting to students and related to current issues. A second important feature is the comprehensive nature of training in the fields of statistics, computers and research methodology. the third important characteristic is the three year follow up phase of the project which provided time to integrate the philosophy of the project into the educational system.