Webinars

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) include much more statistics content than previous standards. Their adoption has created the opportunity and necessity for nearly all middle school and high school mathematics teachers to be prepared to teach a substantial amount of statistics. This session will focus on the topic of sampling variability, a topic that is greatly emphasized in the middle and high school grades in the CCSS. We will present a research-based learning trajectory to help guide teacher preparation on this topic. In addition, we will discuss several unexpected misconceptions that emerged while testing the trajectory with high school teachers. As a group, we will work through an activity together to illustrate how to use the trajectory with teachers.

Like many other research universities, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln relies on graduate student instructors to cover a large portion of the instructional load in the introductory course. In order to better prepare new graduate student instructors, we have implemented a mentoring program that pairs new GTAs with experienced graduate student instructors. Through the mentoring program, the new GTA has a semester to acclimate to graduate school and their new role as instructor, and the senior GTA has the opportunity to emerge as a teacher leader.

This presentation will be about collaborative tests, where students are allowed to work together during the exam. It will include a review about the effectiveness and different formats of collaborative tests along with successful strategies for implementing them in face-to-face and online statistics classes.

The need for a larger proportion of the workforce to enter well equipped with mathematics and statistics skills has been acknowledged in a number of recent reports. To address this need, action must be taken by all stakeholders involved in preparing students for 21st century workforce demands. A collaboration of mathematics and statistics professional societies recently culminated in a workshop focused on identifying strategic steps that might be taken to dramatically increase the flow of mathematical sciences professionals into the workforce pipeline.

Undergraduate study of statistics has been growing in recent years, with the number of students completing stats majors in the United States doubling in the past 5 years. At the same time, the amount and complexity of data being collected increases almost without bound. What should students completing undergraduate majors, minors or concentrations in statistics learn in order to help analyze this flood of information? The American Statistical Association endorsed guidelines in this area in 2000, and a workgroup is now considering what needs to be changed and amplified from the earlier report and supporting materials. In this webinar, participants will hear more about the process, learn about and identify key issues to be considered, and have the opportunity to make suggestions about areas and topics to explore.

This webinar will describe the motivation and summarize the major points of a recently released report on connecting research and practice in statistics education. The report seeks to foster productivity and coherence in statistics education research by providing a portal to the statistics education literature, guidance on important priorities in the field, and the impetus for development and wide use of instruments needed to address fundamental questions in the field.

Lisa Dierker will offer reflections on the pedagogical design and experience of teaching her NSF-funded, passion-driven, project-based introductory statistics course both on campus, at Wesleyan University, and within the Massive Open On-line Course (MOOC) environment. www.wesleyan.edu/qac/curriculum

In this webinar I will discuss my Coursera class "Data Analysis" that was offered for free. I will discuss the course and educational objectives, the platform, and issues that arise when scaling statistics education to a large audience.

We will briefly review the development and evolution of Stat 303: The Art and Practice of Teaching Statistics, a required year-long course for all entering Ph.D. students in the Department of Statistics at Harvard University. The course started in 2005-2006, and has been revised annually to address students' feedback and evolving goals, as listed in the title. Dr. Meng will talk from his syllabus, which he will also display on the screen. Participants can follow the talk/discussions based on the following handouts. Feel free to make copies for note taking.

In this webinar, we will provide an overview of goals and methods of curriculum evaluation that are appropriate for use in statistics education projects, share details of newly developed instruments that may be used in evaluation of these projects, and provide an example of evaluation methods used in the CATALST project along with a summary of what was learned in this evaluation. Additional information on the NSF-funded eATLAS (Evaluation and Assessment of Teaching and Learning About Statistics, NSF DUE 1044812 & 1043141) project will be shared regarding collection of national data to use in future evaluations.