"STATS4STEM - Formative Assessments, Data Sets, & Rweb"
with Eric Simoneau, Boston Latin School
Hosted by: Erin Leatherman, The Ohio State University
Our poster will reflect the work of our NSF funded project - STATS4STEM.ORG. Our poster will revolve mainly around two features of our site. The first is a collection of statistics questions that we are currently building. These questions are embedded into ASSISTments.org, which is a free NSF-funded online assessment and tutoring system. The system allows students to be presented with questions from our growing database of statistical questions. While students work through the questions, they are informed if there questions are correct or not. In addition, as students work through problems, they are allowed to ask for hints if they wish to reach the correct answer. In addition, instructors around the world can easily access our growing collection of questions and assign them to students. Instructors are then provided with a dashboard of vital learning statistics that help the instructors gauge student learning to improve or change his or her teaching practices. The second feature of our site includes a growing collection of real-world datasets that integrate with a web-based version of R called Rweb. This collection of datasets seamlessly integrate with Rweb so that students can begin to experiment with real data as real statisticians do. In addition, we have integrated the use of the datasets and Rweb with the help of ASSISTments. This allows us to ask our students to create a histogram, for example, using an existing STATS4STEM dataset, and if students have a hard time figuring out the code, hints are provided if needed. We have found that with time, students no longer need the hints and begin to really enjoy using R/Rweb to do some real statistical analysis.
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Comments
Paul Hewson:
Hi,
This is quite some resource. Are you using some kind of framework (e.g. Moodle) for building up the assessment or is it all bespoke?
Eric Simoneau:
The assessments are built using the ASSISTments.org tutoring and assessment system that was custom built at WPI.