Webinars

This year, Jeanne and Bill assumed co-editorship of the Chance News Wiki, which as of March 15 will be moving to CAUSEweb. The Wiki provides reviews of current news stories that are relevant to teaching statistics and probability, along with links to original articles and related resources. This webinar will describe the various ways that Chance project materials have been used, in areas ranging from traditional introductory statistics to statistical literacy courses to first-year seminars. We will also discuss the mechanics of posting to the Wiki, and hope to inspire some new contributors.

This is a CAUSE Special Presentation for USCOTS Research Cluster members.

GOLO is a dice-based golf game that simulates playing a round of golf. GOLO can be used to illustrate basic probability concepts, descriptive summaries for data, discrete probability distributions, order statistics, and game theory. Participants will get a chance to play the online version of GOLO. Participants are asked to pre-register on the GOLO website. Instructions: Go to GOLO website: www.igolo.com Click on Play the Online Version Supply email address and create password

During the past 20 years, undergraduate education has shifted from student as passive recipient of information to student as active participant in the classroom. I wrote an article for Chance magazine's 20th anniversary issue titled, "Using Chance to Engage Undergraduates in the Study of Statistics." The article gave examples of activities inspired by Chance magazine articles from the last 20 years. This webinar will take articles from a recent issue of Chance and demonstrate the ease with which any issue can be used to develop class activities that are fun for high school students and undergraduates whether the course is a basic quantitative literacy course, an AP statistics course, an introductory course for non-statistics majors, or a core or elective course for the statistics major.

This webinar will discuss what it means to understand the concept of standard deviation and share a sequence of activities that can be used to help students develop variability. Particular attention will be paid to one activity that challenges students to work together to consider center and variability together, developing a better understanding of the standard deviation. The activities discussed are accompanied by detailed Lesson Plans, developed through our NSF-funded AIMS project.

A model for probabilistic reasoning will be discussed that may support students' statistical reasoning. The development of the model and instructional implications are based on theoretical considerations and empirical results from work with middle grades students. Significant time for discussion is planned to get reactions to the model as well as to discuss aspects of probability that participants believe are foundational to building statistical literacy or reasoning.

This webinar will describe 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 will include 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.

In Statistics as in many disciplines, students need to learn about complex concepts and dynamically changing processes. How can instructors help their students begin to "see" these complex topics the way experts do, and are there tools that can help? In this webinar, I will review key findings on how computer visualizations and simulations can best support student learning and then take those findings to generate effective strategies for teaching with simulations and visualizations.

A real-time online hands-on activity database is introduced for teaching introductory statistics. The activity, "How well can hand size predict height?", will be used to demonstrate how to use real-time activity to engage students to learn bivariate relationship. Various other activities can be found at stat.cst.cmich.edu/statact. The real-time database approach speeds up the process of data gathering and shifts the focus to engage students in the process of data production and statistical investigation.

Statistics educators are keenly aware of the value of using real data to help students see the relevance and applicability of statistics. The federal statistical agencies have invested in significant efforts to make data accessible and available. In this webinar, Ron Wasserstein will point you to these resources, discussing their uses and limitations.