January 12, 2010 T&L webinar presented by Marsha Lovett (Carnegie Mellon University) and hosted by Jackie Miller (The Ohio State University). In Statistics as in many disciplines, students need to learn about complex concepts and dynamically changing processes. How can instructors help their students begin to "see" these complex topics the way experts do, and are there tools that can help? In this webinar, I will review key findings on how computer visualizations and simulations can best support student learning and then take those findings to generate effective strategies for teaching with simulations and visualizations.
April 13, 2010 T&L webinar presented by Jeanne Albert and Bill Peterson (Middlebury College) and hosted by Jackie Miller (The Ohio State University). This year, Jeanne and Bill assumed co-editorship of the Chance News Wiki, which as of March 15 will be moving to CAUSEweb. The Wiki provides reviews of current news stories that are relevant to teaching statistics and probability, along with links to original articles and related resources. This webinar will describe the various ways that Chance project materials have been used, in areas ranging from traditional introductory statistics to statistical literacy courses to first-year seminars. We will also discuss the mechanics of posting to the Wiki, and hope to inspire some new contributors.
May 11, 2010 T&L webinar presented by Ivo Dinov (UCLA) and hosted by Jackie Miller (The Ohio State University). This webinar will present data, tools, materials and the pedagogical approach of the Statistics Online Computational Resource (SOCR) for technology-enhanced probability and statistics education. Following a review of the different types of SOCR online resources, we will go over two specific classroom utilization examples. The first one provides a hands-on demonstration of a statistical concept (CLT) using interactive virtual experiments and simulations. The second example will showcase the use of SOCR resources to address interesting social, health, environmental, scientific, and engineering challenges. In this case, we'll focus on the Ozone pollution in California, formulate health-related hypotheses, identify appropriate data and employ web-based exploratory and statistical data analysis tools.
June 8, 2010 T&L webinar presented by Lynette Hoelter (University of Michigan) and hosted by Leigh Slauson (Capital University). This webinar will introduce several sources of data and tools that could be useful in both general and social science-specific statistics instruction. The Social Science Data Analysis Network (SSDAN) and the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), both a part of the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, are collaborating on two NSF-funded projects to support quantitative literacy in the social sciences. Resources from each organization and TeachingWithData.org, a result of the partnership, will be highlighted. Materials range from small extracts of data from the Census and American Community Surveys used with specific teaching modules to full datasets with accompanying online analysis tools.
STATS magazine contains many articles that may be of interest to students of statistics and educators. Articles vary from those that are meant to teach and inform about different concepts and ideas to those that provide ideas for how to teach important topics to others. Some issues also include interesting data sets and information about ways to become more involved in the greater Statistics community.
January 26, 2010 webinar presented by Alicia Gram, Smith College, and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Capital University. This webinar describes an activity that uses data collected from an experiment looking at the relationship between two categorical variables: whether a cotton plant was exposed to spider mites; and did the plant contract Wilt disease? The activity uses randomization to explore whether there is a difference between the occurrence of the disease with and without the mites. The webinar includes a discussion of the learning goals of the activity, followed by an implementation of the activity then suggestions for assessment. The implementation first uses a physical simulation, then a simulation using technology. (Extra materials, including Fathom instructions for the simulation, available for download free of charge).