Literature Index

This paper reports on one of the "Randomness" questions and on a set of ten "Comparison of Odds" questions, all of which were common to both studies, and for which results have not hitherto been published.

Statistics instructors and others interested in the teaching of statistics will find many print and nonprint resources on this topic. The print literature on the teaching of statistics is largely anecdotal and comprises mainly recommendations for instruction based on the experiences and intuitions of individual instructors. Less than 30% of the print literature reports the results of empirical studies, but these cover a broad range of topics, including the use of computers in statistics education, teaching materials, and teaching strategies. A large portion of the nonempirical literature is devoted to descriptions of statistics courses and specific lessons that, though untested, still provide a resource for instruction. Recently numerous nonprint (electronic) resources for instruction, problem solving, and discussions about statistics instruction have also become available. These include many data sets and other instructional resources, statistics discussion groups, and the electronic Journal of Statistics Education.

This meta-analytic study focused on the quantitative integration and synthesis of the accumulated pedagogical research in undergraduate statistics education literature. These accumulated research studies compared the academic achievement of students who had been instructed using one of the various forms of small-group learning methods to those who had been instructed using lecture-based instruction. The meta-analytic results showed that cooperative, collaborative, and inquiry-based learning methods were used in college-level statistics courses. The results also showed that cooperative and collaborative learning methods supported the effectiveness of the small-group learning methods in improving students’ academic achievement with an overall average effect-size of 0.60. In contrast, the effectiveness of inquiry-based learning was close to zero. This significant positive average effect-size indicated that using small-group learning methods in statistics classrooms could increase the achievement of college students, increasing the scores on a statistics exam from the 50th to the 73rd percentile. In addition, the multilevel analysis revealed that the effect sizes were influenced significantly by the publication-year of the studies, with the most recently published studies having lower effect sizes. The major implication of this study is that evidence-based research supports the effectiveness of active small-group learning methods in promoting students’ achievement in statistics.

The students' interaction with the computer poses new problems of research in Mathematics Education and also offers new methodological resources. One of these is the possibility to employ the recording of the students' interaction with the computer as a technique to gather data on the processes that the students follow to solve the proposed tasks. In this work, different examples of the use of these records in research on Mathematics Education are analyzed, showing the diversity of the obtainable data and the dependence of the same with respect to the "roles" carried out by the computer and the student. We end by presenting the method of analysis of these records that we have used in our own research, that combines qualitative and quantitative elements and can be easily adapted to other research.