Resource Library

The AIMS project developed lesson plans and activities based on innovative materials that have been produced in the past few years for introductory statistics courses. These lesson plans and student activity guides were developed to help transform an introductory statistics course into one that is aligned with the Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) for teaching introductory statistics courses. The lessons build on implications from educational research and also involve students in small and large group discussion, computer explorations, and hands-on activities.

A cartoon that might be used in introducing scatterplots and correlation. Cartoon by John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea from Dennis Pearl (The Ohio State University). Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites.

Submitting your spotlight presentation from USCOTS 2005 to CAUSEweb is an easy process, and you are in a prime position to submit your work! What better way to have your work showcased than in a peer-reviewed repository of contributions to statistics education? This Webinar will be an opportunity to talk about how to prepare your USCOTS spotlight for submission to CAUSEweb and to discuss the benefits of submission. Please join us to discuss how to put the spotlight on CAUSEweb.

Meditation on Statistical Method is a poem by American poet and Brandeis University professor James Vincent Cunningham (1911 - 1985). The poem was originally published in "The Exclusions of a Rhyme: Poems and Epigrams" (1960; Swallow Press) and may also be found in "The collected poems and epigrams of J.V. Cunningham" (1971; Swallow Press).

This NSF funded project provides worksheets and laboratories for introductory statistics. The overview page contains links to 9 worksheets that can be done without technology, which address the topics of obtaining data, summarizing data, probability, regression and correlation, sampling distributions, hypothesis testing and confidence intervals. The page also contains twelve laboratories that require the use of technology. Data sets are provided in Minitab format.

Song calls for the importance of chance, juxtaposed a variety of statistical terms. May be sung to the tune of "Give Peace a Chance" (John Lennon). Musical accompaniment realization and vocals are by Joshua Lintz from University of Texas at El Paso.

Using cooperative learning methods, this activity provides students with 24 histograms representing distributions with differing shapes and characteristics. By sorting the histograms into piles that seem to go together, and by describing those piles, students develop awareness of the different versions of particular shapes (e.g., different types of skewed distributions, or different types of normal distributions), and that not all histograms are easy to classify. Students also learn that there is a difference between models (normal, uniform) and characteristics (skewness, symmetry, etc.).

An interactive box plot applet that allows users to put in their own data that is part of a large collection of platform independent, interactive, java applets and activities for K-12 mathematics and teacher education.

This text based website provides an explanation of some coincidences that are often discussed. It gives an explanation of the birthday problem along with a graphic display of the probability of birthday matches vs. the number of people included. It also discussess other popular coincidences such as the similarities between John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln. It goes on to discuss steaks of heads and tails along with random features of stocks and the stock market prices.

This lesson introduces the Central Limit Theorem and discusses it in terms of the normal distribution, binomial distribution, and Poisson distribution.