Webinars

In this webinar, I will describe a classroom activity where pairs of students hand scrape data from cars.com, ingest these data into R, then carry out analyses of the relationships between price, mileage, and model year for a selected type of car. This early in the semester activity can help illustrate the statistical problem solving process. The "Less Volume, More Creativity" approach utilized by the mosaic package facilitates the analysis with a minimal amount of syntax. Key concepts that are introduced and reinforced including data ingestion, multivariate thinking through graphical visualizations, and regression modeling. Extensions and additional use of the dataset will be discussed along with potential pitfalls. Project Files: https://github.com/Amherst-Statistics/Cars-Scraping-Webinar

Statway is an accelerated pathway for students who place into developmental mathematics that integrates college level introductory statistics with developmental mathematics learning outcomes. Developed by a network of practitioners and researchers organized by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Statway has served over 11,000 students in more than 30 colleges and universities across the country since its launch in 2011. Statway students successfully complete their college level mathematics course credit at three times the rate of their peers in the traditional developmental sequence in half the time. This webinar will present the latest results, learning outcomes, and pedagogical approach of Statway, as well as lessons learned about the design and implementation of effective math pathways more generally.

This webinar will discuss an activity-based method for teaching permutation goodness of fit tests. Using statistical analysis and computer simulations, I will explore the possibility that the Gamemakers, those in charge of planning the Hunger Games, fixed the lottery. No previous knowledge of randomization tests will be required for this webinar – previous knowledge of basic hypothesis testing would be helpful.

Many statistics courses incorporate a final project into the semester which typically begins mid-semester with the bulk of the work in the last few weeks. These projects often involve content from the first few weeks of class which students sometimes struggle with application to their final projects (e.g. data collection, numerical and graphical summaries, etc.) This webinar will present an example of how a short-term project has been incorporated into the first few weeks of the class as a way of gaining additional exposure to these early concepts as well as preparing the students for their larger-scale final projects.

We present an activity for introducing students to the concept of power and factors that influence power. The activity asks students to use a simulation-based approach, with an applet available here http://www.rossmanchance.com/applets/power.html to investigate how likely a baseball player would be to convince a manager that he has improved his probability of getting a hit.

A few inexpensive items have ‘inspired’ a number of classroom experiences that have students discussing experimental design issues and/or generating data in relatively fast and fun ways. This webinar will present a few activities that are often cited as favorites by students taking a statistics course as part of their General Education curriculum. Some possible extensions/variations that could be used in other types of courses will also be discussed. These activities use only an inexpensive set of wooden farm animal puzzles, dice, cards, and a stopwatch.

The Island (island.maths.uq.edu.au) is an online virtual population to support learning and teaching in experimental design, epidemiology and statistical reasoning. This month the Island is celebrating five years since the switch was flicked and the population came to life. In this presentation we will give some examples of how the Island has been used in those five years and suggest some activities for you to try.

There has been an increasing number of school systems which are being held accountable for student performance, however there has not been a corresponding emphasis on school and teacher preparation with which to achieve these standards. Previous studies have shown the variation in teacher preparation both within and between countries. Many studies have shown that teachers are a major factor in predicting student achievement and academic success (Hattie 2008). And yet, to date there has been a lack of cross-national focus on the preparatory programs of educators and available data is sparse. I would like to help bring new attention to the importance of quality teacher training. My paper provides a broad comparison of national education systems, including teacher preparation requirements. I explore this topic by analyzing the performance of students in over 50 countries who participated in the 2006 and 2009 PISA (Program for International Student Assessment). I will demonstrate that high-quality teacher training is related to student achievement and learning and suggests that improving teacher training might contribute to local and national growth and development.

"Which Traits Attract Women: Appearance, Intelligence, Wealth, or Strength?" was the first place winner of the Undergraduate Statistics Class Project Competition. Project mentor, Nathan Tintle of Dordt College, will briefly discuss the class assignment underlying the project and how he handles the project and the competition. Joshua Nymeyer, Dordt College, the team leader from the this class project will present their work.

We have developed a set of freely available web-based apps called StatKey (lock5stat.com/statkey) for supporting statistics courses that use modern simulation methods (such as bootstrap intervals and randomization tests) to introduce the core ideas of statistical inference. In this webinar we demonstrate the main features of StatKey and discuss how it can be used to make these methods easily accessible and understandable for students with a wide variety of backgrounds. Although StatKey's built-in examples are coordinated with the Wiley text Statistics: Unlocking the Power of Data, the tools allow students and instructors to input and analyze their own data and can be used with any course seeking to give students experience with what many people call the "next big thing" in statistics education.