Resource Library

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.

June 22, 2010 Activity webinar presented by Paul Roback, St. Olaf College and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Capital University. This webinar describes an in-class activity, motivated by Case Study 1.1.1 in The Statistical Sleuth, in which students compose haiku poems about statistics. Their poems are used to introduce two-sample t-tests and randomization tests. In addition, the in-class experiment leads to good discussion about experimental design issues, where students compare our design to the actual experiment described in Amabile et al.(1985) "Motivation and Creativity: Effects of Motivational Orientation on Creative Writers", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 48(2): 393-399. I use this activity on the first day of our second course in applied statistics (Statistical Modeling), but it could easily be used in an introductory course as well. Examples of haiku poems which have resulted from this activity can be found under CAUSEweb > Resources > Fun > Poem (direct link), or at www.causeweb.org/cwis/SPT--FullRecord.php?ResourceId=1883.

May 25, 2010 Activity webinar presented by Ivan Ramler, St. Lawrence University and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Capital University. This webinar discusses an undergraduate Mathematical Statistics course project based on the popular video game Guitar Hero. The project included: 1) developing an estimator to address the research objective "Are notes missed at random?", 2) learning bootstrapping techniques and R programming skills to conduct hypothesis tests and 3) evaluating the quality of the estimator(s) under certain sets of scenarios.

This site provides information for those considering careers as a statistician. The site delves into the nature of the work as a statistician, training, other qualifications, and advancement, employment opportunities, job outlook information, and projected earnings.

You can't fix by analysis what you bungled by design. is a quote by American education researchers Richard J. Light, Judith D. Singer, and John B. Willett. The quote is found in the preface of their 1990 book "By Design: planning research on higher education".

This 6 minute 39 second video can be used to teach the difference between correlation and causation. For example, that a relationship between X and Y might be explained by X causing Y, Y causing X, or a third factor that drives them both. The video is episode #109 (Nov 10, 2009) in the Psych Files podcast series produced and hosted by Michael A. Britt, Ph.D. at www.thepsychfiles.com. Video is free to use in the classroom or on course websites under a non-commercial ShareAlike creative commons license.

A joke to teach the meaning of "significance" written in 2011 by University of Texas at El Paso professor of Mathematical Sciences, Lawrence Mark Lesser (1964-).

There is no such thing as no chance is a quote by American businessman and founder of the Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford (1863-1947). The quote is from a speech given to the 1930 class of students at Edison Laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. It is referred to on page 14 of the 1930 book "American Florist".