Resource Library

June 12, 2007 webinar presented by Rob Carver, Stonehill College, and hosted by Jackie Miller, The Ohio Sate University. We've probably all observed that some of our students become positively irritated with the uncertainty that remains after solving a problem of statistical inference. This webinar reports on a continuing empirical investigation of the relationship between Ambiguity Tolerance (AT) and students' facility in developing the skills of inferential reasoning. This research uses some validated measures of AT and of statistical thinking to focus on ambiguity tolerance as an explanatory or moderating factor in learning to apply the techniques of inference.

September 11, 2007 Teaching & Learning webinar presented by Ginger Rowell, Middle Tennessee State University, and hosted by Jackie Miller, The Ohio State University. The Internet is a great source of learning resources to help statistics teachers and students. Examples include interactive applets, videos, tutorials, lesson plans, case studies, and engaging learning activities. This webinar demonstrates how to assess statistics education learning materials based on the peer-review criteria used by digital libraries such as MERLOT and CAUSEweb.

TeachingWithData.org is portal of teaching and learning resources for infusing quantitative literacy into the social science curriculum. A Pathway of the National Science Digital Library, TwD aims to support the social science instructor at secondary and post-secondary schools by presenting user-friendly, data-driven student exercises, pedagogical literature, and much more! Resources are available on a wide range of topics and disciplines.

The ASA Career Center serves as the main clearinghouse for information about jobs, careers, and employment for the statistical profession.

This resource gives 3 questions readers should ask when presented with data and why to ask them: Where did the data come from? Have the data been peer-reviewed? How were the data collected? This page also describes why readers should: be skeptical when dealing with comparisons, and be aware of numbers taken out of context.

September 9, 2008 Teaching and Learning webinar presented by Joan Garfield and Michelle Everson, University of Minnesota and hosted by Jackie Miller, The Ohio State University. This webinar discusses issues and challenges in preparing teachers of statistics at the secondary and college level. It then provides a case study of a graduate level course taught at the University of Minnesota that focuses on developing excellent teachers of statistics. The course is based on the GAISE guidelines and helps the students develop both knowledge of teaching (pedagogical knowledge) and specific knowledge about teaching statistics (pedagogical content knowledge). Topics, readings, activities, assessments, and discussions are described. In addition, the webinar discusses how the course was transformed from a face-to-face setting to an online environment.

March 11, 2008 Teaching and Learning webinar presented by Deborah Nolan, University of California at Berkeley and hosted by Jackie Miller, The Ohio State University. Computing is an increasingly important element of statistical practice and research. It is an essential tool in our daily work, it shapes the way we think about statistics, and broadens our concept of statistical science. Although many agree that there should be more computing in the statistics curriculum and that statistics students need to be more computationally capable and literate, it can be difficult to determine how the curriculum should change because computing has many dimensions. In this webinar Dr. Nolan explores alternatives to teaching statistics that include innovations in data technologies, modern statistical methods, and a variety of computing skills that will enable our students to become active and engaged participants in scientific discovery.

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.