Webinars

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.

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.

In this webinar some recent new adopters of simulation-based inference (SBI) curricula will share their responses to questions such as: What made you switch to SBI from a traditional curriculum? What have you enjoyed most about the switch? What were some of the challenges in switching? What would you do different next time?

In 2005, the Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) College Report was endorsed by the American Statistical Association (ASA). Although the original six recommendations put forward in this report have stood the test of time, we now live in an increasingly data-centric world where our students have access to technologies that were not in existence in 2005. The ASA has therefore made it a priority to revise GAISE so that it continues to be easily and clearly applicable to modern-day teachers of introductory statistics courses. To accomplish this goal, a committee was formed and charged with the task of updating this landmark report. Two members of this committee will facilitate this webinar. In the webinar, we will reflect on how the landscape has changed in Statistics Education over the past 10 years, and we will discuss the process of updating and revising the GAISE report. The audience will have the opportunity to provide feedback and share ideas about the proposed revisions.

We'll describe and explain ASA DataFest, a Big Data Hackathon for undergraduate students, and offer advice on how to throw your own.

This webinar will present research regarding students' conceptions of the line of best fit prior to formal instruction on the topic. Task-based interviews were conducted with thirty-three eighth grade students, focused on tasks that asked them to place the line of best fit on a scatterplot and explain their reasoning as they did so. Results regarding descriptions and categorizations of students' meanings of the line of best fit and criteria they use when placing it will be presented, including video excerpts of the student interviews. Implications for the teaching and learning of the line of best fit will be discussed.

Expectations for teaching statistics have been increased without adequately addressing teachers' preparation. This session will share results from teachers' performance on the NSF-funded LOCUS assessments as well as identify resources that may be used in training teachers during preparation and professional development programs.

Strategies for including important (and sometimes controversial), modern issues from society into an introductory statistical literacy course for liberal arts students will be discussed, including several projects which have been successfully used for 500 students split between large-lecture traditional, fully online, and flipped sections. Topics include advertisement analysis, big data, ethics, social media article discussions, and a service learning project. These new topics and projects capture student interest and show them how relevant statistical literacy is to their daily lives.

Statistics students need to develop the capacity to make sense of the staggering amount of information collected in our increasingly data-centered world. Data science is an important part of modern statistics, but our introductory and second statistics courses often neglect this fact. This webinar discusses ways to provide a practical foundation for students to learn to “compute with data” as defined by Nolan and Temple Lang (2010), as well as develop “data habits of mind” (Finzer, 2013). We describe how introductory and second courses can integrate two key precursors to data science: the use of reproducible analysis tools and access to large databases. By introducing students to commonplace tools for data management, visualization, and reproducible analysis in data science and applying these to real-world scenarios, we prepare them to think statistically in the era of big data.

Wikipedia's page on Statistics Education gets hundreds of hits every week, but until recently the page gave a very limited impression of our discipline. A group at the University of Minnesota has been regularly meeting since fall 2012 to research, update, and improve the Wikipedia coverage of statistics education. We have only begun to scratch the surface of Wikipedia's power to collect and widely disseminate the what, when, who, where, and why of teaching and learning statistics. Come hear about what we've done so far, and how you can get involved in spreading the word about the resources available to statistics educators worldwide.