Resource Library

January 11, 2011 T&L webinar presented by Rakhee Patel(University of California - Los Angeles, UCLA) and hosted by Jackie Miller (The Ohio State University). Since formal hypothesis testing and inference methods can be a challenging topic for students to tackle, introducing informal inference early in a course is a useful way of helping students understand the concept of a null distribution and how to make decisions about whether to reject it. We will present two computer labs, both using Fathom, that illustrate these concepts using permutation in a setting where students will be answering interesting investigative questions with real data.

February 8, 2011 T&L webinar presented by Uri Treisman (Charles Dana Center, University of Texas at Austin) and hosted by Jackie Miller (The Ohio State University). Developmental education in America's community colleges has been a burial ground for the aspirations of our students seeking to improve their lives through education. Under the leadership for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Charles A. Dana Center, nineteen community colleges and systems are building accelerated pathways to and through developmental education with the goal of helping students with low levels of mathematical preparation complete a college credit bearing, transferable statistics course within one year. Uri will describe the work to date, the challenges the initiative faces, and the underlying ideas of improvement science that are driving its development.

Experts often possess more data than judgment. is a quote by former U.S. four-star general and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell (1937 - ). The quote is found in lesson three in the article "Quotations from Chairman Powell: A Leadership Primer" by Oren Harari originally published in 1996 in "Management Review".

This issue contains articles on: The predictive model used by the website FiveThirtyEight.com during the 2008 Presidential election, the design and implementation of an election day exit poll by statistics students, a description of the randomization measures taken to ensure fairness and transparency in the awarding of development grants to farmers in the Republic of Georgia, an explanation of the Item-Matching problem and the Coupon-Collecting problem, together with R code for simulating both problems, and a review of the book, Applied Spatial Statistics for Public Health Data.

This site contains a small collection of videos about how to use Minitab.

This site contains several videos about how to use Mathematica and how to teach with Mathematica.

This site includes several short tutorials that showcase different features of JMP 7. There is also another site with JMP tutorials at http://stat.fsu.edu/tutorials/

September 28, 2010 Activity webinar presented by Carolyn Cuff, Westminster College and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Capital University. Extra materials available for download free of charge. Students must confront their misconceptions before we can teach them new concepts. Naively, a census is an accurate method to quantify a population parameter. A very brief, memorable and easy to implement activity demonstrates that a census is at best difficult even for a small and easily enumerated population.

August 24, 2010 Activity Webinar presented by Jackie Miller, The Ohio State University and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Capital University. Extra materials available for download free of charge. When Dr. Miller took a graduate course in College Teaching, she learned the jigsaw method. The jigsaw is a cooperative learning technique where students work together in a "home" group on a specific task and then are placed into "jigsaw" groups made up of one member from each home group. For example, if there are 25 students in the class, 5 students would be assigned to each of the A, B, C, D, E home groups, and each jigsaw group would each one member from A, B, C, D, and E. While in the jigsaw groups, the students teach each other what they learned in their home groups. Dr. Miller recalls bringing the idea back with her to one of the OSU elementary statistics courses where it has been used successfully since 1996. Recently a graduate teaching assistant (GTA) suggested to other GTAs that this might be good in another introductory statistics course, and the activity has been adopted successfully . As structured, the jigsaw can be used in an exam review in statistics by assigning students to, say, 5 exercises that they need to master before they go to their jigsaw groups to teach others about their exercise. During this webinar, the webinar presents how the jigsaw is done and address questions like: How do you budget your time for this class activity? How do you know that students are teaching the correct answer? How do you know that students are not just furiously writing down answers instead of listening to understand the concept? Can this work for you? By the end of the webinar, hopefully you will be as intrigued as Dr. Miller was to learn about the jigsaw method and will want to try it in your classroom.

July 27, 2010 Activity Webinar presented by Herle McGowan, North Carolina State University and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Capital University. Extra materials available for download free of charge. In this webinar, the webinar discusses the end-of-semester project that is used in North Carolina State's introductory statistics course. This project supports statistical thinking by allowing students to apply knowledge accumulated throughout the semester. Students are presented with a research question and must design and carry out an experiment, analyze the resulting data and form a conclusion over the course of several class periods.