Resource Library

Funded by the National Science Foundation, workshops were held over a three-year period, each with about twenty participants nearly equally divided between mathematics educators and statisticians. In these exchanges the mathematics educators presented honest assessments of the status of mathematics education research (both its strengths and its weaknesses), and the statisticians provided insights into modern statistical methods that could be more widely used in such research. The discussions led to an outline of guidelines for evaluating and reporting mathematics education research, which were molded into the current report. The purpose of the reporting guidelines is to foster the development of a stronger foundation of research in mathematics education, one that will be scientific, cumulative, interconnected, and intertwined with teaching practice. The guidelines are built around a model involving five key components of a high-quality research program: generating ideas, framing those ideas in a research setting, examining the research questions in small studies, generalizing the results in larger and more refined studies, and extending the results over time and location. Any single research project may have only one or two of these components, but such projects should link to others so that a viable research program that will be interconnected and cumulative can be identified and used to effect improvements in both teaching practice and future research. The guidelines provide details that are essential for these linkages to occur. Three appendices provide background material dealing with (a) a model for research in mathematics education in light of a medical model for clinical trials; (b) technical issues of measurement, unit of randomization, experiments vs. observations, and gain scores as they relate to scientifically based research; and (c) critical areas for cooperation between statistics and mathematics education research, including qualitative vs. quantitative research, educating graduate students and keeping mathematics education faculty current in education research, statistics practices and methodologies, and building partnerships and collaboratives.

The Islands is a free, innovative, online virtual human population created by Dr Michael Bulmer from the University of Queensland. The Islands supports the teaching of statistics through data investigations by providing students with a realistic virtual world where they can propose statistical questions, design investigations and collect the necessary data for statistical analysis and interpretation. The wide range of data and tasks available on the Islands caters to many scientific areas and student interests. Must create an account to access this virtual world.

November 14, 2006 webinar presented by Chrstine Franklin, University of Georgia, and Jessica Utts, University of California and hosted by Jackie Miller, The Ohio State University. In 2005 the American Statistical Association endorsed the recommendations of a report written by leading statistics educators, called "Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education" (GAISE). The report had two parts - one for K-12 and one for the college introductory statistics course. In this webinar, two members of the report-writing team review the recommendations in the report, and provide suggestions for how to begin to implement them.

October 10, 2006 webinar presented By John Holcomb, Cleveland State University, and hosted by Jackie Miller, The Ohio State University. This webinar presents a quick overview of assessment methods related to student writing assignments and data analysis projects. Beginning with short writing assignments, Dr. Holcomb progresses through a range of different approaches to projects at the introductory course level. On-line resources containing existing project ideas will be shown along with ideas for creating one's own projects. The webinar also discusses several approaches to evaluating the range of assignments.

Webinar presented September 12, 2006 by Brian Jersky, St. Mary's College, and Robert Gould, UCLA, and hosted by Jackie Miller, The Ohio State University. This webinar discusses resources available to educators to assist them in crafting lesson plans that meet the GAISE. The presenters briefly explain the GAISE, which were endorsed by the American Statistical Association and also the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and demonstrate various resources offered through CAUSEweb and other channels.

February 13, 2007 webinar presented by Jim Albert, Bowling Green State University, and hosted by Jackie Miller, The Ohio State University. An introductory statistics course is described that is entirely taught from a baseball perspective. This class has been taught as a special section of the basic introductory course offered at Bowling Green State University . Topics in data analysis are communicated using current and historical baseball datasets. Probability is introduced by describing and playing tabletop baseball games. Inference is taught by distinguishing between a player's "ability" and his "performance", and then describing how one can learn about a player's ability based on his season performance. Baseball issues such as the proper interpretation of situational and "streaky" data are used to illustrate statistical inference.

January 9, 2007 webinar presented by Sterling Hilton, Brigham Young University, and hosted by Jackie Miler, The Ohio State University. Beginning in January 2005, the ASA (with support from the National Science Foundation) started a series of three workshops for statisticians and mathematics education researchers. The purpose of these workshops was to make recommendations on ways to promote high-quality education research that can stand up under the scrutiny of other scientific communities and that will allow work to be compared and combined across research programs. A draft version of the final report from these workshops entitled "Using Statistics Effectively in Mathematics Education Research" has been written. This webinar summarizes the major points of this report and discuss their relevance to researchers in statistics education.

December 12, 2006 webinar presented by Michelle Everson, University of Minnesota, and hosted by Jackie Miller, The Ohio State University. This webinar focuses on describing an introductory statistics course that is taught completely online. The structure of this course is described, and samples of different student assignments and activities are presented. Assessment data and student feedback about the course are also presented. Discussion focuses on issues that must be considered when developing and administering an online course, such as the instructor's role in the online course and ways to create an active learning environment in an online course.

March 13, 2007 webinar presented by Andrew Zieffler, University of Minnesota, and hosted by Jackie Miller, The Ohio State University. The interdisciplinary field of inquiry that is statistics education research spans a diverse set of disciplines and methodologies. A recent review of a subset of this literature, the research on teaching and learning statistics at the college level, was used to raise some practical issues and pose some challenges to the field of statistics education. These are addressed in this CAUSE webinar. In addition, a recent doctoral dissertation study is used to illustrate some of these challenges and offer suggestions for how to deal with them.

January 26, 2010 webinar presented by Alicia Gram, Smith College, and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Capital University. This webinar describes an activity that uses data collected from an experiment looking at the relationship between two categorical variables: whether a cotton plant was exposed to spider mites; and did the plant contract Wilt disease? The activity uses randomization to explore whether there is a difference between the occurrence of the disease with and without the mites. The webinar includes a discussion of the learning goals of the activity, followed by an implementation of the activity then suggestions for assessment. The implementation first uses a physical simulation, then a simulation using technology. (Extra materials, including Fathom instructions for the simulation, available for download free of charge).