This site is a collection of interesting stories in the news that relate to statistics, major league baseball standings, links to textbooks, and links to applets. It also contains some reflections on statistical issues from retired professor John Marden (from University of Illiois at Urbana-Champaign).
Share with your students why the presence of an outlier affects which measure of central tendency to report. Feel free to modify this Powerpoint presentation to fit the needs of your students. Included at the end are additional online resources to further engage your students in their learning about the mean, median, and mode. The presentation is covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
This is a site that contains a number of types of material that can be used in teaching about chance and probability. Lesson plans, syllabi, suggested activities, and data sets are available. The data sets contain interesting information for students such as: quarterback passing rating data, baseball streaks, and baseball salaries that can be used to illustrate means, medians, etc.. The site also contains a link to the Chance News (which is now a wiki on CAUSEweb).
In this module, students can test their knowledge of levels of measurement by attempting to determine the the level of measurement of ten different variables. For each variable, a statement is also provided and students can indicate whether the statement about the variable is valid or invalid (given the way in which the variable was measured). There is also a brief "refresher" included here about levels of measurement.
May 25, 2010 Activity webinar presented by Ivan Ramler, St. Lawrence University and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Capital University. This webinar discusses an undergraduate Mathematical Statistics course project based on the popular video game Guitar Hero. The project included: 1) developing an estimator to address the research objective "Are notes missed at random?", 2) learning bootstrapping techniques and R programming skills to conduct hypothesis tests and 3) evaluating the quality of the estimator(s) under certain sets of scenarios.
June 22, 2010 Activity webinar presented by Paul Roback, St. Olaf College and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Capital University. This webinar describes an in-class activity, motivated by Case Study 1.1.1 in The Statistical Sleuth, in which students compose haiku poems about statistics. Their poems are used to introduce two-sample t-tests and randomization tests. In addition, the in-class experiment leads to good discussion about experimental design issues, where students compare our design to the actual experiment described in Amabile et al.(1985) "Motivation and Creativity: Effects of Motivational Orientation on Creative Writers", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 48(2): 393-399. I use this activity on the first day of our second course in applied statistics (Statistical Modeling), but it could easily be used in an introductory course as well. Examples of haiku poems which have resulted from this activity can be found under CAUSEweb > Resources > Fun > Poem (direct link), or at www.causeweb.org/cwis/SPT--FullRecord.php?ResourceId=1883.
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.