Resource Library

These slides from the 2014 ICOTS workshop describe a minimal set of R commands for Introductory Statistics. Also, it describes the best way to teach them to students. There are 61 slides that start with plotting, move through modeling, and finish with randomization.

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.

October 12, 2010 T&L webinar presented by George Cobb(Mount Holyoke College) and hosted by Leigh Slauson (Capital University). What's the best way to introduce students of mathematics to statistics? Tradition offers two main choices: a variant of the standard "Stat 101" course, or some version of the two-semester sequence in probability and mathematical statistics. I hope to convince participants to think seriously about a third option: the theory and applications of linear models as a first statistics course for sophomore math majors. Rather than subject you to a half-hour polemic, however, I plan to talk concretely about multiple regression models and methodological challenges that arise in connection with AAUP data relating faculty salaries to the percentage of women faculty, and to present also a short geometric proof of the Gauss-Markov Theorem.

September 14, 2010 T&L webinar presented by Thomas Moore(Grinnell College) and hosted by Jackie Miller(The Ohio State University). Permutation tests and randomization tests were introduced almost a century ago, well before inexpensive, high-speed computing made them feasible to use. Fisher and Pitman showed the two-sample t-test could approximate the permutation test in a two independent groups experiment. Today many statistics educators are returning to the permutation test as a more intuitive way to teach hypothesis testing. In this presentation, I will show an interesting teaching example about primate behavior that illustrates how simple permutation tests are to use, even with a messier data set that admits of no obvious and easy-to-compute approximation.

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.

July 13, 2010 T&L webinar presented by Webster West (Texas A&M University) and hosted by Jackie Miller(The Ohio State University). In introductory statistics courses, web-based applets are often used to visually conduct large simulation studies illustrating statistical concepts. However, it is difficult to determine what (if anything) students learn from repeatedly pressing a button when using applets. More advanced options such as writing/running computer code are typically considered to be much too advanced for most introductory courses. The web-based software package, StatCrunch, now offers simulation capabilities that strike a middle ground between these two extremes. The instructor/student needs only to perform a small number of steps using the menu driven interface with each step being key to understanding the underlying data structure. This talk will cover the steps required to study concepts such as the central limit theorem, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing and regression using StatCrunch.

A cartoon for use by teachers of night statistics classes. The cartoon is the work of Theresa McCracken and appears as #7178 on McHumor.com Free for non-profit use in statistics course such as in lectures and course websites.