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(a)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 University of Minnesota
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