Webinars

This webinar will provide a tour of CAUSEweb.org and its special collections and features. The webinar will also provide ways for community involvement in building the collections and seek audience suggestions for future projects.

Statway is an accelerated pathway for students who place into developmental mathematics that integrates college level introductory statistics with developmental mathematics learning outcomes. Developed by a network of practitioners and researchers organized by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Statway has served over 11,000 students in more than 30 colleges and universities across the country since its launch in 2011. Statway students successfully complete their college level mathematics course credit at three times the rate of their peers in the traditional developmental sequence in half the time. This webinar will present the latest results, learning outcomes, and pedagogical approach of Statway, as well as lessons learned about the design and implementation of effective math pathways more generally.

Research on faculty professional development suggests that in order for faculty to change their teaching, they must perceive a problem, be presented with changes they can adapt to their own teaching style, and see evidence of change in student learning based on the changes. Many words in statistics pose a barrier for entry level students because they everyday meanings which differ from their discipline usage within statistics; this can lead to lexical ambiguity for students. The webinar will focus on two High-Impact, Little-Time (HILT) activities developed by faculty involved in a faculty learning community to help exploit lexical ambiguities associated with parameter. We will present the activities, along with the data that show the effectiveness of the activities with respect to student learning.

Professional development for educators can be done in a flexible format that meets the needs of teachers of statistics in a variety of contexts. Design principles and sample learning opportunities will be shared that are part of the Teaching Statistics Through Data Investigations MOOC for Educators. The course is offered several times a year and thus far has served over 2500 educators from all 50 states, and over 45 countries. See http://friday.institute/tsdi.

This webinar will present several media clips from popular films and television programs and show how they can be used to introduce topics in a first-year statistics course. A simulation-based activity motivated by one of the clips will be demonstrated.

This webinar will discuss an activity-based method for teaching permutation goodness of fit tests. Using statistical analysis and computer simulations, I will explore the possibility that the Gamemakers, those in charge of planning the Hunger Games, fixed the lottery. No previous knowledge of randomization tests will be required for this webinar – previous knowledge of basic hypothesis testing would be helpful.

The Common Online Data Analysis Platform (CODAP) is an online, free, and open source descendant of Fathom and TinkerPlots (though still far from a replacement for them). We’ll look at ways you can already use CODAP in the classroom and understand where ongoing development at Concord Consortium will take it.

Many statistics courses incorporate a final project into the semester which typically begins mid-semester with the bulk of the work in the last few weeks. These projects often involve content from the first few weeks of class which students sometimes struggle with application to their final projects (e.g. data collection, numerical and graphical summaries, etc.) This webinar will present an example of how a short-term project has been incorporated into the first few weeks of the class as a way of gaining additional exposure to these early concepts as well as preparing the students for their larger-scale final projects.

Statistics courses that focus on data analysis in isolation, discounting the scientific inquiry process, may not motivate students to learn the subject. By involving students in other steps of the inquiry process, such as generating hypotheses and data, students may become more interested and vested in the analysis step. Additionally, such an approach might better prepare students to tackle real research questions outside of the statistics classroom. Presented here is a classroom activity utilizing the popular Hasbro board game Operation, which requires student involvement in the entire research process. Highlighted are ways this activity uncovers a number of research issues. A number of categorical and continuous variables are collected, making the activity amenable to a variety of statistical investigations and thus easy to imbed into any curriculum. Designed to mimic a real-world research scenario, this fun activity provides a guided yet flexible research experience from start to finish.

We present an activity for introducing students to the concept of power and factors that influence power. The activity asks students to use a simulation-based approach, with an applet available here http://www.rossmanchance.com/applets/power.html to investigate how likely a baseball player would be to convince a manager that he has improved his probability of getting a hit.