The Effect of Simulation Software on Students' Attitudes and Understanding in Introductory Statistics

Although the use of software has become widespread in elementary statistics courses, there has been little formal evaluation of its effectiveness. In this experiment with the use of software, primarily for simulations in an introductory statistics course, effectiveness was measured in two ways: whether students did better on examinations and whether they believed that the software was useful. Results showed that students did significantly better on the examinations and that about half of them considered the software to be useful. However, even among those who believed that the software was helpful, many objected to the extra time involved.