Caroline Brophy, National University of Ireland Maynooth
Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - 12:00pm ET
Active learning opportunities can be difficult to generate when teaching large groups of students. In this webinar, I will present an experiment using Sudoku puzzles that can be easily conducted in a lecture with 300 (or more) students. The factor manipulated in the experiment is the type of Sudoku puzzle and there are four types, which are each the same puzzle but with different characters. The experiment yields a rich data set which can be used to illustrate basic statistical methods such as chi-square test for independence of categorical variables, through to more complicated analyses such as survival analysis techniques. I will outline the experiment and give an overview of the teaching opportunities that the data present.
Amy G. Froelich, Iowa State University
Tuesday, April 15, 2014 - 12:00pm ET
As a part of an opening course survey, data on eye color and gender were collected from students enrolled in an introductory statistics course at a large university over a recent four year period. Biologically, eye color and gender are independent traits. However, in the data collected from our students, there is a statistically significant dependence between the two variables. In this article, we present two ideas for using this data set in the classroom, and explore the potential reasons for the dependence between the two variables in the population of our students.
Alison Gibbs & Emery Goossens, University of Toronto
Tuesday, March 18, 2014 - 12:00pm ET
Our current students are among the first to have been vaccinated against HPV. Have they ever considered how the accumulation of the evidence for the efficacy of the vaccine resulted in recommendations for its widespread provision? Using data sourced from a meta-analysis of clinical trials for HPV vaccines, we will examine this evidence. We will show how these data can be used to illustrate applications of methods of categorical data analysis, for students in courses at a variety of levels. And we will describe how this case study can be used to promote discussion of concepts in the design of experiments, statistical concerns such as independence of observations, and the importance of context in the interpretation of the results of data analyses.
Brad Bailey & Dianna Spence, University of North Georgia
Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - 12:00pm ET
In this presentation we will discuss student-directed discovery projects in statistics, which are intended as the means through which statistical content is taught to the students. In particular, we will delineate the purpose and scope of a project covering linear regression analysis and another project covering comparisons with basic t-tests. We will describe curriculum materials developed to help instructors facilitate such projects and provide the web address where these materials can be accessed. We will give examples of how instructors use the curriculum materials to guide students through the projects' stages. In particular, the materials can be used to provide the students with clear information about the project requirements and what activities the students are expected to be engaged in during each phase of the student-directed projects. These projects are truly student-directed in that the students select their own research topic, define their own variables, and devise and carry out their own data collection plan before analyzing and interpreting their data. The students report their results in two forms: a written report is provided to the instructor and a brief formal presentation is made before the rest of the class. In both formats, the students report the findings of their research project, as well as explain why they chose the particular research topic, explain how they gathered, organized and analyzed the data and list any short-comings they perceive in their own project. Our presentation will include specific examples of projects that students have conducted. Finally, we will also discuss the rationale for assigning such projects, including the potential benefits of such projects - benefits suggested by both prior and on-going research - and possible factors mediating those benefits.
Jennifer L. Green, Montana State University and Erin E. Blankenship, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Tuesday, January 21, 2014 - 3:30pm ET
We developed an introductory statistics course for pre-service elementary teachers. In this webinar, we will describe the goals and structure of the course, as well as the assessments we implemented. Overall, the course aims to help pre-service teachers recognize the importance of statistics in the elementary curriculum, as well as the integral role they, as teachers, can play in a student's entire statistical education.
Amy G. Froelich & Dan Nettleton, Iowa State University
Tuesday, November 19, 2013 - 12:00pm ET
Many new parents have heard claims of a striking resemblance between them and their babies. As parents ourselves, we were skeptical of such claims so we devised a study to objectively answer the question "Does my baby really look like me?" In this webinar, we will present a study to test whether neutral observers perceive a resemblance between a parent and a child. We will demonstrate the general approach with two parent/child pairs (Amy and her daughter and Dan and his son) using survey data collected from introductory statistics students serving as neutral observers. We will then present ideas for incorporating the study design process, data collection, and analysis into different statistics courses.
M. Ryan Haley, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
Monday, November 18, 2013 - 12:00pm ET
This paper describes a textbook -development paradigm that has the flexibility to meet the specific needs of a department, college, and surrounding business community, while simultaneously lowering costs for students, facilitating the transition from intro-level to mid- and upper-level courses, preserving professor-specific preferences over course content and structure, increasing the quality and uniformity of the curriculum, overcoming difficulties of traditional rental programs, enhancing the professional development and teaching ability of professors, and improving student learning outcomes.
Jacqueline Wroughton, Northern Kentucky University
Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - 12:00pm ET
In this webinar I will discuss the development and assessment of an activity used in an introductory calculus-based statistics course to distinguish between these three discrete distributions. Students from the assessment were students in one of these courses.
Lawrence Lesser, The University of Texas at El Paso; Rob Carver, Stonehill College; and Patricia Erickson, Taylor University; on behalf of the paper's 11-author team
Tuesday, August 20, 2013 - 12:00pm ET
In this webinar, we discuss the rationale and results for an exploratory survey on (N = 249) statistics instructors' use of fun, including their motivations, hesitations, and awareness of resources. Respondents were attendees at the 2011 United States Conference on Teaching Statistics and 16 completed phone interviews after the conference.
Kirsten Doehler & Laura Taylor; Elon University
Tuesday, July 16, 2013 - 12:00pm ET
Our presentation will highlight the needs in statistics education from the perspective of client disciplines based on the use of statistics in teaching and research in various academic affiliations. This information will cultivate discussion on how to use the information to guide curriculum development in introductory statistics. As a result of this study, a large data set was compiled that can be used in the classroom for students to explore. A demonstration of how to access and use the data set in class will be given.