Resource Library

This applet builds confidence intervals for the percentage of orange candies in box with two colors of candies. A smaller box visualizes the sample, and a graph keeps track of the location of the confidence interval. Students can take one sample (producing one CI) repeatedly, or take 100 random samples at once. The population percentage is hidden from view unless the student asks to see it, in which case it is displayed on the graph of confidence intervals. This allows the students to see whether each interval "hits" or "misses". Several parameters can be varied: sample size, confidence level and number of samples. A set of questions alongside the applet guides students.

This issue contains articles about Karl Pearson (150 years after his birth); finding more ways to make learning statistics fun; simulating capture-recapture sampling in Excel and by hand; common misconceptions in statistics; a correlation-based puzzler and a STAT.DOKU puzzle.

OStats is a simple tool for data visualisation and statistical analysis, particularly aimed at helping students learn statistics.

A song for use in helping students to recognize how a change in units affects the variance (since variance is expressed in squared units).  Music & Lyrics by Tom Toce, ^©2015 Retrograde Music.  This song is part of an NSF-funded library of interactive songs that involved students creating responses to prompts that are then included in the lyrics (see www.causeweb.org/smiles for the interactive version of the song, a short reading covering the topic, and an assessment item).

A song for use in helping students to interpret positive, negative, and zero correlation and transfer knowledge about associations to new context/situations.  Lyrics by Lawrence M. Lesser and may be sung to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” This song is part of an NSF-funded library of interactive songs that involved students creating responses to prompts that are then included in the lyrics (see www.causeweb.org/smiles for the interactive version of the song, a short reading covering the topic, and an assessment item).

A song for use in helping students to recognize and construct examples to illustrate how correlation does not imply causation.  Music & Lyrics ^© 2016 by Monty Harper.  This song is part of an NSF-funded library of interactive songs that involved students creating responses to prompts that are then included in the lyrics (see www.causeweb.org/smiles for the interactive version of the song, a short reading covering the topic, and an assessment item).

A song for use in helping students to recognize and construct examples to illustrate how correlation does not imply causation.  Music & Lyrics ^© 2016 by Monty Harper.  This song is part of an NSF-funded library of interactive songs that involved students creating responses to prompts that are then included in the lyrics (see www.causeweb.org/smiles for the interactive version of the song, a short reading covering the topic, and an assessment item).

A song for use in helping students to recognize, in context, parts of a chi-squared test for independence (null, degrees of freedom, and observed versus expected rationale. Lyrics © 2015 by Dominic Dousa and Lawrence M. Lesser, Music © 2015 by Dominic Dousa  from The University of Texas at El Paso.  This song is part of an NSF-funded library of interactive songs that involved students creating responses to prompts that are then included in the lyrics (see www.causeweb.org/smiles for the interactive version of the song, a short reading covering the topic, and an assessment item).

A song for use in helping students to recognize when the Central Limit Theorem applies.  Music & Lyrics ^©2016 by Greg Crowther from Everett Community College. This song is part of an NSF-funded library of interactive songs that involved students creating responses to prompts that are then included in the lyrics (see www.causeweb.org/smilesfor the interactive version of the song, a short reading covering the topic, and an assessment item).

This site is a collection of interesting stories in the news that relate to statistics, major league baseball standings, links to textbooks, and links to applets. It also contains some reflections on statistical issues from retired professor John Marden (from University of Illiois at Urbana-Champaign).