This page provides general
resources for teaching statistics. Currently, the page contains
descriptions and links for a
variety of web resources available to statistics teachers.
Web Resources for
Teaching Statistics
| Statistical Thinking page (University of
Baltimore)
http://home.ubalt.edu/ntsbarsh/Business-stat/opre504.htm
This page, by Dr. Hossein Arsham, provides detailed tutorials on an enormous array of statistical topics, including narrative, formulas, diagrams, and links to selected web-based calculators. The site is said to be for business/managerial topics, but it would appear to be useful for learning statistics, regardless of discipline.
StatPages -- Hundreds of online calculators
Retired
professor John C.
Pezzullo has
compiled a gigantic set of links to online statistical calculators (380 calculating pages and over
600 links overall). Some of the online calculators allow input of
raw data, whereas others will accept sample statistics (e.g., means,
SD's, frequencies) and provide statistical tests (e.g., t,
chi-square). For the kinds of specialized statistical tests that researchers
generally had to do by hand calculation in yesteryear, such as comparing correlation coefficients, online calculators are now
available. Rice Virtual Lab in Statistics
http://onlinestatbook.com/rvls.html Like other pages, the Rice Virtual Lab provides tutorials and calculators. Other features that are unique (or relatively so) to the Rice page include interactive, animated activities to demonstrate statistical concepts (e.g., for correlations with restriction of range, the user can set the boundaries of data values and see what happens to the value of r), and case studies of experiments and their data analyses. StatSoft Electronic Textbook
http://www.statsoft.com/textbook/stathome.html This site provides tutorials on a wide array of statistical topics, with a generous supply of diagrams (some of them interactive). |
As a graduate
student, I took a course
on the general use of metaphor
in science. It struck me that drawing
such parallels among things
that exist in nature, or
“kinds,”
the precise terms created
to capture the essence of the
“kinds,”
and the imprecise (but
rich-by-analogy) metaphors used
to represent the relations
between them, might be beneficial
in my teaching. One clearly
runs the risk of imprecision
and, but with rare exception, all
good metaphors eventually fall
apart. However, a good metaphor
or analogy taps existing
knowledge structures about how a set
of things relate, thereby aiding
in learning the precise “term”
for the “kind” and the
relational nature among the “terms” for
the “kinds.” --Todd Little, APA Division 5 Cohen Teaching Award Winner |
American Statistical Association
http://www.amstat.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=main
This venerable organization (founded in 1839) is a major home for statisticians. Although much of the scholarship of ASA's journals and meetings covers "pure" statistics, the organization also has more applied sections, including those on health, sports, and methodology.
Journal of Statistics Education
http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/
One of ASA's journals, JSE provides substantive free online articles on the teaching of statistics, as well as an archive of small, "real world" datasets for instructors to use in their stat classes.
Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education (CAUSE)
This NSF-funded organization, which grew out of an ASA initiative, lists four areas in which it aims to advance undergraduate statistics education, "resources, professional development, outreach, and research." In connection with CAUSE, national conferences on the teaching of statistics have been hosted by The Ohio State University in 2005 and 2007. In addition, CAUSE provides a number of web-based resources including classroom activities and "webinars" (seminars, in which the audio and slides are made available live and in archived form).
| I
personally believe that we are all latent scientists of sorts, if only
at an informal level. We each go about making hypotheses about everyday
events and situations, based on more or less formal theories. We then
collect evidence for or against these hypohteses and make conclusions
and future predications based on our findings. When this process is
formalized and validated in well-supported environments, the
opportunity for a major contribution by a well-informed individual
becomes much more likely. Further, this is accompanied by a deeply felt
sense of satisfaction and reward. That has certainly been my
experience. -- Lisa Harlow, APA Division 5 Cohen Teaching Award
winniner. |
Principles of Learning Statistics
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/teaching_aids/books_articles/isi/section3_7.html
This site provides pedagogical advice to statistics instructors, drawing upon empirical findings on how students learn.
Assessment Tools for Statistical Literacy
https://app.gen.umn.edu/artist/
This NSF-funded project focuses on assessment of students' learning of statistics. The site provides a repository of assessment ideas and measures, including test items, surveys, and projects students can do.
Quantitative Reasoning University
http://statlit.org/PDF/2006LutskyQRU.pdf
This site provides a list of readings (many of them from popular media) to further statistical understanding, as well as a list of 10 questions that savvy statistical consumers would want to ask.
International Association for Statistics Education
http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~iase/
This organization serves the
international statistics-education community,
offering publications, conferences, and other resources.
| Instead
of memorizing formulas, strive to understand the important concepts and
think about ways that the concepts can be applied. In what situations
is a particular statistic useful? How is the statistic interpreted?
What assumptions must be fulfilled to interpret the statistic? When you
read about an experiment in your field, consider how you would have
designed it and how you would have analyzed the data. And check out
your ideas by talking about them with your professor. --Roger Kirk, APA
Division 5 Cohen Teaching Award winner |
Some of the images on this page were generated using the free package R with the following code.
x <- rnorm(100,5,1.5)
