This survey assesses statistical literacy. The survey focuses on the general use of informal statistics in everyday situations: reading and interpreting tables and graphs involving rates and percentages.
This article discusses teaching causality without being discipline specific. It explains the causal differences between description, prediction and explanation.
This paper presents rules for determining whether an index variable in such a table is part or whole depending on whether the associated margin value is an average, a sum or a 100% sum. Tables with missing margin values -- date-indexed tables, half tables and control tables -- are analyzed. Recommendations are made to improve reader understanding of any table involving rates or percentages.
This paper presents three graphs that are used in teaching students majoring in business and the humanities. These graphs show the influence of confounding, the meaning of statistical significance, and the influence of confounding on statistical significance.
A specially-designed statistical literacy course is needed for college students in majors that don't require statistics or mathematics. This paper suggests that key topics in conditional probability, multivariate regression and the vulnerability of statistical significance to confounding should be included and presents some new ways to teach these ideas.
The following exercise can illustrate the problem of bias in estimators to students in statistics courses. In some advanced courses an alternative estimator may be presented and properties of this estimator may be investigated via Monte Carlo studies.
This article describes a method to calculate the least squares line algebraically. First, the author uses a numeric example, which uses calculus, then describes a simpler algebraic method.
The dataset described in this article contains information on 345 plays on an electronic slot machine and the prize for each. This data can be used to illustrate parametric bootstrapping and tests of independence for two and three-way contingency tables involving random zeroes. Key Words: Simulation; Elementary probabilities.
This article describes a dataset on the readability of booklets about cancer and the reading levels of patients with cancer. Students should be familiar with scales of measurement, data reduction, measuring center, constructing and interpreting displays, and reaching conclusions in real problems. Key Words: Ordinal data, Means, Medians, Histograms
