Webinars

Writing can be a wonderful tool to help illuminate what students are learning in our statistics courses. Examples and strategies to include writing in your teaching toolkit -- and to increase the writing skills of students -- include team assignments, weekly case reports, in-class questions, and others. The webinar will share effective approaches and assignments gleaned from twenty years of using writing in introductory and upper-level statistics courses.Watch Webinar Recording (FLASH)

The Internet is a great source of learning resources to help statistics teachers and students. Examples include interactive applets, videos, tutorials, lesson plans, case studies, and engaging learning activities. This webinar will demonstrate assessing statistics education learning materials based on the peer-review criteria used by digital libraries such as MERLOT and CAUSEweb.Watch Webinar Recording (FLASH)

Carnegie Mellon University was funded to develop a "stand-alone" web-based introductory statistics course, and for the last several semesters we've been studying different ways in which the course can be used to support instruction. In this presentation I'll discuss some of the challenges in developing such a learning environment and ways in which the course tries to address them, as well as describe the design and results of our studies.Watch Webinar Recording (FLASH)

Drawing from (and expanding upon) his article in the March 2007 Journal of Statistics Education, Larry Lesser will discuss and invite discussion about examples, resources and pedagogy associated with this meaningful way of engaging students in the statistics classroom. Also a November 2008 webinar on this topic tailored to K-12 teachers is available at the ASA webinar site.Watch Webinar Recording (FLASH)

We've probably all observed that some of our students become positively irritated with the uncertainty that remains after solving a problem of statistical inference. This webinar reports on a continuing empirical investigation of the relationship between Ambiguity Tolerance (AT) and students' facility in developing the skills of inferential reasoning. This research uses some validated measures of AT and of statistical thinking to focus on ambiguity tolerance as an explanatory or moderating factor in learning to apply the techniques of inference.Watch Webinar Recording (FLASH)

Bill Notz, the Editor of the Journal of Statistics Education (JSE), will discuss all aspects of the journal. He will outline the mission and history of the journal, describe the various departments of the journal, explain what you can find at the journal's web site, indicate the types of manuscripts the journal seeks to publish, and mention possible future directions. He will be happy to answer any questions participants may have. These could range for suggestions about how to write articles, review times, resources, or even how one could become involved with the journal.Watch Webinar Recording (FLASH)

Distance education and online learning opportunities, collectively known as "e-learning", are becoming increasingly used in higher education. Nationally, online enrollment increased to 3.2 million students in 2005, compared to 2.3 million in 2004.[1] Furthermore, nearly 60% of higher education institutions identify e-learning as part of their long-term education strategy.[1] Newer educational technologies including course management systems and Internet-based conferencing software can be used to both deliver content and engage participants as part of a social learning community. However, even experienced faculty can face pedagogical and operational challenges as they transition to the online environment. This interactive presentation will discuss a systematic approach to developing web-based instruction, with our experience as a case example. [1] The Sloan Consortium. Making the grade: online education in the United States, 2006. Needham, MA: Sloan-C; 2006. Available from: www.sloan-c.org/publications/survey/survey06.asp. [Accessed 3/15/07]Watch Webinar Recording (FLASH)

The interdisciplinary field of inquiry that is statistics education research spans a diverse set of disciplines and methodologies. A recent review of a subset of this literature, the research on teaching and learning statistics at the college level, was used to raise some practical issues and pose some challenges to the field of statistics education. These will be addressed in the CAUSE webinar. In addition, a recent doctoral dissertation study will be used to illustrate some of these challenges and offer suggestion for how to deal with them.Watch Webinar Recording (FLASH)

An introductory statistics course is described that is entirely taught from a baseball perspective. This class has been taught as a special section of the basic introductory course offered at Bowling Green State University . Topics in data analysis are communicated using current and historical baseball datasets. Probability is introduced by describing and playing tabletop baseball games. Inference is taught by distinguishing between a player's "ability" and his "performance", and then describing how one can learn about a player's ability based on his season performance. Baseball issues such as the proper interpretation of situational and "streaky" data are used to illustrate statistical inference.Watch Webinar Recording (FLASH)

Beginning in January 2005, the ASA (with support from the National Science Foundation) started a series of three workshops for statisticians and mathematics education researchers. The purpose of these workshops was to make recommendations on ways to promote high-quality education research that can stand up under the scrutiny of other scientific communities and that will allow work to be compared and combined across research programs. A draft version of the final report from these workshops entitled "Using Statistics Effectively in Mathematics Education Research" has been written. This webinar will summarize the major points of this report and discuss their relevance to researchers in statistics education.Watch Webinar Recording (FLASH)