Webinars

Expectations for teaching statistics have been increased without adequately addressing teachers' preparation. This session will share results from teachers' performance on the NSF-funded LOCUS assessments as well as identify resources that may be used in training teachers during preparation and professional development programs.

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.

We motivate and illustrate a lesser-known dynamic physical model for the median, offer pedagogical discussion and support, and share results of a pilot assessment with pre-service middle school teachers. Before the webinar, we invite you to browse our article "http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v22n3/lesser.pdf" , or at least watch the 1-minute video http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v22n3/pulley_loop_physical_model_of_median.html of the model in action.

Strategies for including important (and sometimes controversial), modern issues from society into an introductory statistical literacy course for liberal arts students will be discussed, including several projects which have been successfully used for 500 students split between large-lecture traditional, fully online, and flipped sections. Topics include advertisement analysis, big data, ethics, social media article discussions, and a service learning project. These new topics and projects capture student interest and show them how relevant statistical literacy is to their daily lives.

Statistics students need to develop the capacity to make sense of the staggering amount of information collected in our increasingly data-centered world. Data science is an important part of modern statistics, but our introductory and second statistics courses often neglect this fact. This webinar discusses ways to provide a practical foundation for students to learn to “compute with data” as defined by Nolan and Temple Lang (2010), as well as develop “data habits of mind” (Finzer, 2013). We describe how introductory and second courses can integrate two key precursors to data science: the use of reproducible analysis tools and access to large databases. By introducing students to commonplace tools for data management, visualization, and reproducible analysis in data science and applying these to real-world scenarios, we prepare them to think statistically in the era of big data.

This presentation discusses the creation and delivery of an introductory statistics course as part of a master’s degree program for in-service mathematics teachers. We give an overview of the master’s degree program and discuss aspects of the course, including the goals for the course, course planning and development, the instructional team, the evolution of the course over multiple iterations. In addition, we present lessons learned through five offerings including what we have learned about its value to the middle-level teachers who have participated.

Students need exposure to Bayesian thinking at early stages in their mathematics and statistics education. While many students in upper level probability courses can generally recite the differences in the Frequentist and Bayesian inferential paradigms, these students often struggle using Bayesian methods when conducting data analysis. Specifically, students tend to struggle translating subjective belief to the specification of a prior distribution and the incorporation of uncertainty in the Bayesian inferential approach. The purpose of this webinar is to present a hands-on activity involving the Beta-Binomial model to facilitate an intuitive understanding of the Bayesian approach through subjective problem formulation which lies at the heart of Bayesian statistics.

We present a data set and case study exercise that can be used by educators to teach a range of statistical concepts including Simpson’s paradox. The data set and case study are based on a real-life scenario where there was a claim of discrimination based on ethnicity. The exercise highlights the importance of performing rigorous statistical analysis and how data interpretations can accurately inform or misguide decision makers.

Eiki's presentation begins at the 28 minute mark. See Part 1.

Wikipedia's page on Statistics Education gets hundreds of hits every week, but until recently the page gave a very limited impression of our discipline. A group at the University of Minnesota has been regularly meeting since fall 2012 to research, update, and improve the Wikipedia coverage of statistics education. We have only begun to scratch the surface of Wikipedia's power to collect and widely disseminate the what, when, who, where, and why of teaching and learning statistics. Come hear about what we've done so far, and how you can get involved in spreading the word about the resources available to statistics educators worldwide.