Resource Library

A sketch by Anastasia Mandel reinterpreting Blacksmiths Taking a Drink by Jean Francois Raffaelli (1884) with the statistical caption "Looks like Kolmogorov-Smirnoff testing." This is part of a collection of sketches by Anastasia Mandel and their accompanying statistical captions discussed in the paper "How art helps to understand statistics" (Model Assisted Statistics and Applications, 2009) by Stan Lipovetsky and Igor Mandel in volume 4 pages 313-324. Free to use in classrooms and on course websites.

An important idea in statistics is that the amount of data matters. We often teach this with formulas --- the standard error of the mean, the t-statistic, etc. --- in which the sample size appears in a denominator as √n. This is fine, so far as it goes, but it often fails to connect with a student's intuition. In this presentation, I'll describe a kinesthetic learning activity --- literally a random walk --- that helps drive home to students why more data is better and why the square-root arises naturally and can be understood by simple geometry. Students remember this activity and its lesson long after they have forgotten the formulas from their statistics class.

August 14, 2007 Teaching & Learning webinar presented by Oded Meyer, Carnegie Mellon University, and hosted by Jackie Miller, The Ohio State University. Carnegie Mellon University was funded to develop a "stand-alone" web-based introductory statistics course, and for several semesters they studied different ways in which the course could be used to support instruction. In this presentation, Dr. Meyer discusses some of the challenges in developing such a learning environment and ways in which the course tries to address them, as well as describing the design and results of accompanying studies.

October 9, 2007 Teaching & Learning webinar presented by Norean Sharpe, Babson College, and hosted by Jackie Miller, The Ohio State University. Writing can be a wonderful tool to help illuminate what students are learning in our statistics courses. Examples and strategies to include writing in your teaching toolkit -- and to increase the writing skills of students -- include team assignments, weekly case reports, in-class questions, and others. This webinar shares effective approaches and assignments gleaned from twenty years of experience using writing in introductory and upper-level statistics courses.

December 11, 2007 Teaching and Learning webinar presented by Mark L. Berenson, Montclair State University, and hosted by Jackie Miller, he Ohio State University. As we consider how we might improve our introductory statistics courses, we are constrained by a variety of environmental/logistical and pedagogical issues that must be addressed if we want our students to complete the course saying it was useful, it was relevant and practical, and that it increased their communicational, computational, technological and analytical skills. If not properly considered, such issues may result in the course being considered unsatisfying, incomprehensible, and/or unnecessarily obtuse. This Webinar focuses on key course content concerns that must be addressed and engages participants in discussing resolutions. Participants also had the opportunity to describe and discuss other content barriers to effective statistical pedagogy.

April 8, 2008 Teaching and Learning webinar presented by Beth Chance and Allan Rossman, Cal Poly - San Luis Obispo and hosted by Jackie Miller, The Ohio State University. Math majors, and other mathematically inclined students, have typically been introduced to statistics through courses in probability and mathematical statistics. We worry that such a course sequence presents mathematical aspects of statistics without emphasizing applications and the larger reasoning process of statistical investigations. This webinar describes and discusses a data-centered course that we have developed for mathematically inclined undergraduates.

May 13, 2008 Teaching and Learning webinar presented by Joy Jordan, Lawrence University and hosted by Jackie Miller, The Ohio State University. Writing can be an effective instrument for students learning new concepts, and there is a plethora of writing-to-learn research. This Webinar summarizes important findings from the writing literature, as well as providing specific writing-assignment examples for the introductory statistics classroom.

July 8, 2008 Teaching and Learning webinar presented by Shonda Kuiper, Grinnell College and hosted by Jackie Miller, The Ohio State University. Many instructors use projects to ensure that students experience the challenge of synthesizing key elements learned throughout a course. However, students can often have difficulty adjusting from traditional homework to a true research project that requires searching the literature, transitioning from a research question to a statistical model, preparing a proposal for analysis, collecting data, determine an appropriate technique for analysis, and presenting the results. This webinar presents multi-day lab modules that bridge the gap between smaller, focused textbook problems to large projects that help students experience the role of a research scientist. These labs can be combined to form a second statistics course, individually incorporated into an introductory statistics course, used to form the basis of an individual research project, or used to help students and researchers in other disciplines better understand how statisticians approach data analysis.

February 10, 2009 Teaching and Learning webinar presented by Andrew Zieffler, Bob delMas, and Joan Garfield, University of Minnesota, and hosted by Jackie Miller, The Ohio State University. This webinar presents an overview of the materials and research-based pedagogical approach to helping students reason about important statistical concepts. The materials presented were developed by the NSF-funded AIMS (adapting and Implementing Innovative Materials in Statistics) project at the University of Minnesota (www.tc.umn.edu/~aims).

May 12, 2009 Teaching and Learning hour-long webinar panel discussion presented by Laura Kubatko, The Ohio State University; Danny Kaplan, Macalester College; and Jeff Knisley, East Tennessee State University, and hosted by Jackie Miller, The Ohio State University. National reports such as Bio2010 have called for drastic improvements in the quantitative education that biology students receive. The three panelists are involved in three differently structured integrative programs aimed to give biology students the statistics that are useful in learning and doing biology. The three programs have some surprising things in common for teaching introductory statistics. All three involve connecting calculus and statistics. All three reach beyond the mathematical topics usually encountered in intro statistics in important ways. All three aim to keep the mathematics and statistics strongly connected to biology. The panelists describe their different approaches to teaching statistics for biology and discuss how and why an integrated approach gives advantages. Important issues are how to tie statistics advantageously with calculus, how to keep "advanced" mathematical and statistical topics accessible to introductory-level biology students, and how to employ computation productively. The discussion contrasts a comprehensive "team" approach (at ETSU) with stand-alone courses (at Macalester and at OSU) and refers to the institutional opportunities and constraints that have shaped the programs at their different institutions.