Resource Library

This activity uses Microsoft Excel for a simulation of probability concepts. The Excel file and handouts are provided. Students will explore the concept of independent events, sample spaces, equally likely probabilities, and percentages within the context of this simulation.

This site provides the contents of the online book "The Assessment Challenge in Statistics Education".

The Decision Bonsai are a hybrid of concept maps and decision trees. They were originally developed to give introductory statistics students a map to inference procedures but have evolved to be used for other topics. The tree is 'grown' during the semester so that students build a picture of the relationships in their mind. Recent work is moving toward the development of more complete concept maps for introductory statistics, statistical quality methods and probability and stochastic processes courses. These Decision Bonsai would be then pointed to at appropriate points in the concept maps.

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.

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.

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.

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 article discusses teaching causality without being discipline specific. It explains the causal differences between description, prediction and explanation.

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 lesson is based on Lawrence Lesser's article that describes the set-up of the spreadsheet simulation and Cindia Stewart's lesson that seeks to answer the Birthday Problem using three different methods. Probability topics include: Sample Size, Law of Large Numbers, Complementary Probabilities, Independence of Events