JOINING THE DOTS: DIRECTED ONLINE TUTORIALS FOR STATISTICS


Authors: 
Richard Wilson and Michael Bulmer
Pages: 
online
Year: 
2008
Publisher: 
Proceedings from the 6TH AUSTRALIAN CONFERENCE ON TEACHING STATISTICS (OZCOTS)
URL: 
http://silmaril.math.sci.qut.edu.au/ozcots2008/OZCOTS-08-Proceedings.pdf
Abstract: 

Two issues often arise in the teaching of statistical models and methods to large groups of<br>students in non-statistics programmes. Firstly, such students struggle with the relevance and the<br>applicability of the material to their own discipline. Secondly, these students struggle with the<br>notion of randomness, how to model it and how to account for it in their analyses. One approach<br>to dealing with the second issue is to expose students to as much data as possible, for both single<br>and multiple contexts, by providing individual data sets to each student for tutorial and<br>assignment work. This has been the approach taken in developing DOTS, Directed Online<br>Tutorials for Statistics, for students in engineering and the health sciences at the University of<br>Queensland. The current version of DOTS will be presented and discussed, as well as future<br>directions.

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