Resource Library

March 13, 2007 webinar presented by Andrew Zieffler, University of Minnesota, and hosted by Jackie Miller, The Ohio State University. The interdisciplinary field of inquiry that is statistics education research spans a diverse set of disciplines and methodologies. A recent review of a subset of this literature, the research on teaching and learning statistics at the college level, was used to raise some practical issues and pose some challenges to the field of statistics education. These are addressed in this CAUSE webinar. In addition, a recent doctoral dissertation study is used to illustrate some of these challenges and offer suggestions for how to deal with them.

...experiment without mathematics will neither sufficiently discipline the mind or sufficiently extend our knowledge... is a quote by Scottish geophysicist Balfour Stewart (1828 - 1887). The quote is found in a letter from Stewart to Henry Roscoe of Owens College on June 2, 1870.

Theory is a good thing, but a good experiment is forever. is a quote by Russian nobel prize winning physicist Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa (1894 - 1984). The quote is found on page 160 of "Experiment, theory, practice, articles and addresses volume 46."

Don 't worry about polls, but if you do, don't admit it. is a quote by former First Lady Eleanor Rosalynn Smith Carter (1927 - ).

A poem by Notre Dame College Mathematics professor Anthony Masci. The poem was awarded an honorable mention in the 2011 CAUSE A-Mu-sing competition.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. is a quote by American author and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882). The quote was written as a journal entry on November 11, 1842.

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).

A song parody to be sung about one's favorite statistics course. The lyrics won an honorable mention in the song category of the 2011 CAUSE A-Mu-sing contest and were written by Robert Carver of Stonehill College. The song may be sung to the tune of George and Ira Gershwin's 1937 classic "They Can't Take That Away from Me." Musical accompaniment realization and vocals are by Joshua Lintz from University of Texas at El Paso.

I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in reality. And reality has a well-known liberal bias. is a quote by American political satirist Stephen Tyrone Colbert (1964 - ). The quote is from a performance on April 29, 2006 at the annual White House Correspondents' Association Dinner.

A game to aid in teaching experimental design and significance testing (especially one sample, two sample, and matched pair situations). Tangrams are puzzles in which a person is expected to place geometrically shaped pieces into a particular design. The on-line Tangram Game provides students the opportunity to design many versions of the original game in order to test which variables have the largest effect on game completion time. A full set of student and instructor materials are available and were created by Kevin Comiskey (West Point), Rod Sturdivant (Ohio State University) and Shonda Kuiper (Grinnell College) as part of the Stat2Labs collection.