Literature Index

There is evidence that students have prior conceptions about fairness and these conceptions appear to have the potential to interfere with the learning of statistics topics such as simulation with physical manipulatives, surveys, randomized experiments, and expected value, as well as the understanding of words such as bias or discrimination. Because of this, it is strongly recommended that statistics instructors explicitly acknowledge and take into account the role that student views of fairness play. Related to equity and fairness beliefs is the possible interaction of cultural background with the learning of specific topics, and empirical evidence (p < .01) suggests that this can happen with certain populations when using the common courtroom metaphor to illustrate hypothesis testing

The set of computer programs described in the present paper have been developed since the summer of 1984 in support of a teacher outreach program administered by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation in Princeton, New Jersey, and the Quantitative Literacy project sponsored by the American Statistical Association/National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Joint Committee on the Curriculum in Statistics and Probability. In general, the statistical techniques supported by the Nightingale programs are the Exploratory Data Analysis techniques which have appeared in Exploring Data (Landwehr & Watkins, 1986). From inception, the Nightingale Programs have been designed to support teachers who would bring statistics and EDA techniques into the classroom. The present writer has used the programs in his own statistics class at the high school level in the United States and has supported other teachers' use in science and social studies classes. They have been field tested over the past two years by students and teachers, and myriad "perfecting amendments" have been offered and taken advantage of.

Cobb attempts to make the claim that we have been too quick to dismiss the objective-format question means of assessment in statistics courses in favor of authentic assessment (e.g., projects, oral presentations, writing assignments).

The Open Learning Initiative (OLI) is an open educational resources project at<br>Carnegie Mellon University that began in 2002 with a grant from The William and Flora Hewlett<br>Foundation. OLI creates web-based courses that are designed so that students can learn<br>effectively without an instructor. In addition, the courses are often used by instructors to support<br>and complement face-to-face classroom instruction. Our evaluation efforts have investigated OLI<br>courses' effectiveness in both of these instructional modes - stand-alone and hybrid.<br>This report documents several learning effectiveness studies that were focused on the OLIStatistics<br>course and conducted during Fall 2005, Spring 2006, and Spring 2007. During the Fall<br>2005 and Spring 2006 studies, we collected empirical data about the instructional effectiveness of<br>the OLI-Statistics course in stand-alone mode, as compared to traditional instruction. In both of<br>these studies, in-class exam scores showed no significant difference between students in the<br>stand-alone OLI-Statistics course and students in the traditional instructor-led course. In contrast,<br>during the Spring 2007 study, we explored an accelerated learning hypothesis, namely, that<br>learners using the OLI course in hybrid mode will learn the same amount of material in a<br>significantly shorter period of time with equal learning gains, as compared to students in<br>traditional instruction. In this study, results showed that OLI-Statistics students learned a full<br>semester's worth of material in half as much time and performed as well or better than students<br>learning from traditional instruction over a full semester.