Dear Instructor,

I am writing to request your assistance in helping me recruit introductory statistics students (at either the undergraduate or graduate level) to take part in the field-testing of an assessment tool designed to measure important statistical literacy and statistical reasoning learning outcomes of introductory statistics courses. This field-testing is part of my dissertation research, under the supervision of my advisers, Joan Garfield and Andrew Zieffler at the University of Minnesota.

The assessment is composed of 40 multiple-choice items assessing topics such as representations of data; measures of center and variability; study design; hypothesis testing and p-value; probability; and bivariate data and accommodates a wide variety of introductory statistics curricula. Students should be able to complete the assessment in less than an hour.

The instrument is administered online. Other than asking that students work independently to complete the assessment, there are no other constraints on the administration (e.g., it could be completed in-class or outside of class). To increase student participation and effort when completing the assessment, you may want to provide credit or extra credit to your students. To incentivize you to recruit students, if your students complete the assessment, I will provide you with summary data describing your students’ performance. I will also provide a pooled summary of performance across all participating institutions.

Ideally, I would like you to administer the instrument to your students by May 2^nd. If this will not be possible, please let me know, and I can work with you to find a time that works. Students should have the opportunity to learn the concepts before taking the assessment, so I ask that you please administer the assessment close to end of the course.

If you are interested, please contact me at sabb0013@umn.edu with the following information:

- Institution name;

- Course name;

- Number of sections;

- Number of students in each section;

- Short description of the curriculum (normal/t-distribution methods; resampling/simulation methods; etc).

I sincerely hope that you will be able to help during this phase of my study, and I thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Anelise G. Sabbag

Doctoral Candidate

Department of Educational Psychology