Literature Index

Many teachers whose backgrounds are not in statistics must teach statistical concepts. Non-statisticians face extra challenges in preparing for a statistics class, including uncertainty about content and pedagogy. This article addresses this challenge by suggesting the use of CAUSEweb, an online repository of statistics education resources. Methods are described to incorporate this resource into the planning and teaching of several difficult statistical concepts, including time series and hypothesis testing, using resources tailored to different application areas, such as biology, engineering, and chemistry.

Opening Real Science (ORS) is a three-year government initiative developed as part of the Mathematics and Science Teachers program. It is a collaboration across universities involving teacher educators, scientists, mathematicians, statisticians and educational designers aimed at improving primary and secondary pre-service teachers’ competence and confidence in mathematics and science. The ORS project has developed 25 online learning modules for pre-service teacher programs. Statistical literacy is prioritised. The Statistical Literacy Module for Primary Teachers (SL-P) adopts an inquiry-based approach and uses resources and contexts relevant to their practice. This paper documents the development and evaluation process of SL-P from its conception to implementation, and reviews the initial trials .

The traditional textbook is a familiar and useful tool that has served well for centuries. Here, we discuss OpenIntro Statistics, a new textbook that seeks to retain the long-standing points of excellence among traditional textbooks, while overcoming what is potentially the most important traditional limitation: exclusivity. OpenIntro Statistics is a completely open-source textbook, which can be downloaded for free and edited by anybody. Its content meets the highest established standards, and is is written, edited, and reviewed by faculty from leading universities. In this paper, we provide support for the assertion that OpenIntro Statistics retains as many of the advantages of a traditional textbook as possible, while empowering the largest possible audience to own and edit introductory content in statistics. We also discuss how the open-source textbook model differs from other technologically enabled alternatives to the traditional textbook, and consider trends in the textbook over the coming years.

Human perception and memory are often explained as optimal statistical inferences that are informed by accurate priorprobabilities. In contrast, cognitive judgments are usually viewed as following error-prone heuristics that are insensitive to priors. We examined the optimality of human cognition in a more realistic context than typicallaboratory studies, asking people to make predictions about the duration or extent of everyday phenomena suchas human life spans and the box-office take of movies. Our results suggest that everyday cognitive judgments follow the same optimal statistical principles as perception and memory, and reveal a close correspondence between people's implicit probabilistic models and the statistics of the world.