Proceedings

  • Most people realise that Excel can be used to carry out statistical analyses of data but what is not so well known is that it provides an extremely flexible and versatile teaching tool for constructing computer demonstrations. In this paper we first show a number of pre-built Excel workbooks for demonstrating statistical ideas - these illustrate the range of things that can be achieved. Then we show that building such workbooks is quite easy by showing how to construct a useful computer demonstration "from scratch" in just a few minutes, starting with a blank workbook. The aims of the paper are to outline benefits of using Excel for teaching statistics and to encourage other teachers to experiment with their own demonstrations and ideas.

  • This paper describes our experience teaching S-Plus to first year computer and mathematical science students. We explain the reason for selecting S-Plus as the statistical package for our students and describe the material prepared to introduce the package and how it was presented. We also outline the problems that students experienced, analyse the reasons for these problems and the ways we are attempting to overcome these.

  • The present work aims to investigate the educational value of statistics as perceived by teachers involved in the teaching of this subject in schools of every type and level in the city of Palermo. To achieve this aim a preliminary fact-finding investigation was performed.

  • The purpose of this research is to investigate the knowledge of the 1st grade High School students relating to the basic concepts of Statistics that are taught in Elementary School in Greece and to determine the effect that teaching through activities has on their performance. This research, which is part of a broader research conducted by the Department of Primary Education of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, was realised at the prefectures of Imathia and Pieria. The research provided useful conclusions, such as that the majority of teachers use traditional approaches in their teaching of Statistics, that students have a fair knowledge of most of Statistics' concepts that are included in the Elementary School Curriculum, that major improvement of this knowledge is observed after a teaching approach through activities and that the performance of students who live in urban areas is better in comparison to the performance of those who live in rural areas.

  • In fulfilling their brief to build a digital university the Centre for IT in Higher Education (ITEd), presents academic modules in Digital Media to staff and students from technologically under-resourced backgrounds who have had limited opportunities for acquiring practical IT skills. In a core module on Research Data Analysis Theory and Tools, a component on Computer-based Quantitative Data Analysis develops competency in advanced software tools to assist implementation of research projects. A challenge of this course has been to build confidence in learners with limited statistical and quantitative backgrounds, who articulate anxiety and phobia about work of this nature. This paper reports on the design, implementation, assessment and outcomes of a predominantly Internet and web-based course that used the metaphor of a Big Bother/Survivor Challenge process to prepare largely 'quantophobic' post-graduate students and staff to conduct sound quantitative data analysis in research projects while reducing 'quantophobia' and building confidence. Initial results suggest that the use of the metaphor, together with other design features of the course, contributed to reduced 'quantophobia' and increased confidence with quantitative work.

  • The necessity for stimulating the interest of pupils in mathematics in general and statistics in particular is made clear by the results of surveys. The studies showed, that pupils are tired of mathematics. Mathematics is generally regarded as one of the most unpopular subjects at school. The pupils don't achieve so well in this subject . The causes might originate in several variables. The spectrum of possible causes for these bad results stretches from genetic disposition to deficits in learning behaviour. One of the aspect is that mathematics/statistics use the symbol language. And just exactly this language is what we want to look at more closely. As an essential feature of symbols the fact must be emphasized that they "all mean something other than themselves, that they all point to something besides themselves".

  • We attempt to use simulation to teach confidence interval for the slope parameter and prediction interval for the future observation in the simple linear regression model. Computer program in JAVA is written to illustrate the simulation in a step-by-step manner. As the observation vector is being generated, the scatter diagram, fitted line and confidence interval will be displayed. Histograms for the individual observations will be built up slowly and the proportion of confidence intervals covering the true value will be updated .The students will realize that the proportion tends to the desired value. Similarly prediction interval can be taught by using simulation .The students will realize that the average value of the proportion of the future observations falling inside the prediction interval tends to the desired value.

  • Discussions of students' understandings of key course concepts typically investigate those understandings at one point in time. This paper reports results from a case study in which eighteen graduate students were interviewed throughout a fifteen-week introductory statistics course. Knowledge structures were assessed once every three weeks, and changes in these structures were discussed. One key finding was that students' understandings of certain course concepts change as the semester progresses, indicating that it may not be enough to assess these understandings at only one point in time. Two concepts in particular, mean and variance, are central to many ideas in the introductory course. Assessing how students "know" these concepts throughout the course may be beneficial to researchers and educators alike. Implications for both statistics education research and teaching introductory statistics are offered.

  • In basic Statistics classes, we are often interested in "Tree Diagrams", which provide a visual way for our students to compute how many ways various events can occur. One special example of this is the US National Collegiate Association of America (NCAA) Basketball tournament, which takes place in March of each year. Fans get caught up in "March Madness," and enjoy trying to predict the "Final Four". In this paper, we discuss many aspects of this tournament, including sharing of what the Tree diagram looks like, various probabilities of what different teams will do, and making predictions about what will happen in the First Round and beyond.

  • Undergraduates at California State University, Chico's College of Agriculture do experimental research including data analysis. Desire to see if treatments differ, motivates students to learn inferential statistics. Students analyze data with ANOVA programs written for Microsoft Excel. These programs return an analysis with one or at most a few mouse clicks; they handle missing data - a problem in real world experiments. In statewide science competitions, our students routinely place first or second.

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