Literature Index

The Statistics Online Computational Resource (http://www.SOCR.ucla.edu) provides one of the largest collections of free Internet-based resources for probability and statistics education. SOCR develops, validates and disseminates two core types of materials - instructional resources and computational libraries.

Learning basic statistical concepts does not need to be tedious or dry; it can be fun and interesting through cooperative learning in the small-group activity of Statistics Poker. This article describes a teaching approach for reinforcing basic statistical concepts that can help students who have high anxiety and makes learning and reinforcing these concepts more interesting and fun.

Students at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) come from diverse cultures and often disadvantaged communities where basic amenities, such as running water and electricity, are not a given. The majority (63% in 2001) of our students had their first exposure to computers at university. In order to fast-track these students to meet increasing technological needs, more effective methods of teaching Statistics needed to be explored. Since 1997 innovative teaching approaches such as collaborative learning, teamwork and the use of mind maps were introduced and used to aid students to become acquainted with the prescribed subject matter. These new approaches were compared to traditional classroom teaching in 1997. These interventions were successful in that students not only studied the prescribed material more efficiently, they also developed skills to function effectively in a multicultural team, preparing them for the working environment in South Africa.

This article presents selected results from the fall 1995 Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences (CBMS) survey about statistics courses, faculty, and degrees in departments of statistics, departments of mathematics or mathematical sciences, and in mathematics programs at two-year colleges.