Tutorial

August 10, 2010 T&L webinar presented by Diane Fisher (University of Louisiana at Lafayette), Jennifer Kaplan (Michigan State University), and Neal Rogness (Grand Valley State University) and hosted by Jackie Miller(The Ohio State University). Our research shows that half of the students entering a statistics course use the word random colloquially to mean, "haphazard" or "out of the ordinary." Another large subset of students define random as, "selecting without prior knowledge or criteria." At the end of the semester, only 8% of students we studied gave a correct statistical definition for the word random and most students still define random as, "selecting without order or reason." In this session we will present a classroom approach to help students better understand what statisticians mean by random or randomness as well as preliminary results of the affect of this approach.

November 9, 2010 T&L webinar presented by Jiyoon Park and Audbjorg Bjornsdottir (University of Minnesota) and hosted by Jackie Miller (The Ohio State University). This webinar presents the development of a new instrument designed to assess the practices and beliefs of teachers of introductory statistics courses. The Statistics Teaching Inventory (STI) was developed to be used as a national survey to assess changes in teaching over time as well as for use in evaluating professional development activities. We will describe the instrument and the validation process, and invite comments and suggestions about its content and potential use in research and evaluation studies.

This is short clip from a longer documentary shown on BBC. The BBC documentary takes viewers on a rollercoaster ride through the wonderful world of statistics to explore the remarkable power thay have to change our understanding of the world, presented by superstar boffin Professor Hans Rosling, whose eye-opening, mind-expanding and funny online lectures have made him an international internet legend. Rosling is a man who revels in the glorious nerdiness of statistics, and here he entertainingly explores their history, how they work mathematically and how they can be used in today's computer age to see the world as it really is, not just as we imagine it to be. Rosling's lectures use huge quantities of public data to reveal the story of the world's past, present and future development. Now he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers - in just four minutes.