Literature Index

The enclosed summaries were provided by working group facilitators and placed in the public domain in an unedited form to inform dialouge about and contribute to the improvement of assessment practices in statistics education. A formal conference report is in the planning stage.

Technology has been used as an active learning tool in Workshop Statistics, a project that involved the development and implementation of curricular materials which guide students to learn fundamental statistical ideas through self-discovery. Using the workshop approach, the lecture-format was completely abandoned. Classes are held in microcomputer-equipped classrooms in which students spend class-time working<br>collaboratively on activities carefully designed to enable them to discover statistical concepts, explore statistical principles, and apply statistical techniques.<br><br>The workshop approach uses technology in three ways. First, technology is used to perform the calculations and present the visual displays necessary to analyze real datasets, which are often large and cumbersome. Freeing students from these computational chores also empowers the instructor to focus attention on the understanding of concepts and interpretation of results. Second, technology is used to conduct simulations, which allow students to visualize and explore the long-term behavior of sample statistics under repeated random sampling. Whereas these two uses of technology are fairly standard, the most distinctive use of technology within the workshop approach is to enable students to explore statistical phenomena. Students make predictions about a statistical property and then use the computer to investigate their predictions, revising their predictions and iterating the process as necessary.

One important part of statistical education is the training of teachers. It would seem to the author that while most teacher education programmes for primary teachers include mathematics education courses, they do not specifically address statistical education. In addition, teachers who enter these programmes would have taken mathematics in school and possibly at post-secondary institutions, but their exposure to statistics would have been limited. Since statistical thinking is different from other forms of thinking, the situation seems to have implications for teacher training. Reasoning under uncertainty is a different way of looking at the world. An accountant may be very good at what he or she does, but the author, for one, would not like an accountant to perform surgery. This paper will raise some questions associated with statistical knowledge as it applies to primary teachers.

This webinar will present a quick overview of assessment methods related to student writing assignments and data analysis projects. Beginning with short writing assignments, we will progress through a range of different approaches to projects at the introductory course level. On-line resources containing existing project ideas will be shown along with ideas for creating one's own projects. We will also discuss several approaches to evaluating the range of assignments.