teaching statistics is awesome – a blog for statistics teachers
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The goal of this blog is to support statistics teachers and share some statistics love ♥ Authored by Anna-Marie Fergusson.
teaching statistics is awesome – a blog for statistics teachers
5M ago
Back in June, I gave a five minute talk as part of the opening session of USCOTS – the U.S. Conference On Teaching Statistics. We were warned to practice our talks to make sure we keep to our time limit, which made me wonder how many words I could actually fit into five-minute talk. Since recordings are made for my lectures, I had this idea to explore the number of words I use when teaching, by analysing my lecture recordings.
I was able to obtain automatically generated captions for each of my lectures via the YouTube data API and a R package called {tuber}. In total, for my STATS 100 (Conce ..read more
teaching statistics is awesome – a blog for statistics teachers
5M ago
Thinking about what it means to explore data, and how to teach students to explore data, has become a passion of mine ever since I started exploring teaching with a wider range of data. It started back in 20151, when I worked on rewriting a set of lectures for our very large introductory statistics course at the University of Auckland for a new chapter called “Exploring data”. A paper I wrote and presented at the International Conference on Teaching Statistics (ICOTS) describes one example from this data exploration chapter involving social media data. I tell the story of using Instagram data ..read more
teaching statistics is awesome – a blog for statistics teachers
5M ago
A few years back, I created the first version of the random redirect tool that now lives at allocate.monster. I developed the tool to support New Zealand statistics students to conduct questionnaire-based experiments online, but soon started getting emails from Masters/PhD student and “actual” researchers about using the tool.
I think that’s pretty cool, and just shows how connected the statistics we teach in high school classrooms is to what happens in actual research practice. It’s also pretty cool how varied the contexts for the research are e.g. perceptions of animal faces, impact of scre ..read more
teaching statistics is awesome – a blog for statistics teachers
5M ago
It was awesome to be one of the opening speakers at this year’s US Conference on Teaching Statistics this morning at 4am – thank you again Allan Rossman and Kelly McConville for the invitation! Each of the speakers had five minutes to share something related to the conference theme of Broadening horizons, and all of the other speakers in this session gave amazing talks. You’ll soon be able to check out videos of their talks and slides here, which I would highly recommend. In the meantime, you can find my slides here: bit.ly/datalandscapes
[PS it’s not too late to register and attend USCOTS v ..read more
teaching statistics is awesome – a blog for statistics teachers
5M ago
I wrote a guest post earlier this week for Allan Rossman’s excellent blog Ask Good Questions. If you aren’t already subscribed to Allan’s blog you should be! He spent a year writing a new post every week, so there are so many very good advice and ideas for teaching statistics on his blog. Allan’s work with Beth Chance on teaching simulation-based inference has influenced a lot of what we teach in New Zealand, so you’ll also recognise some of the activities (and look for the shout out to New Zealand!)
The post I wrote features lots of photos of cats but also, and more importantly, gives you an ..read more
teaching statistics is awesome – a blog for statistics teachers
5M ago
While I continue to decide whether to quit Facebook, I’ve been trying to keep on top of my admin responsibilities for the Stats Teachers NZ Facebook group while keeping an eye on any stats-related posts on the NZ Maths teachers Facebook group. Since not everyone is on Facebook, I thought I’d do a quick post sharing some of the ideas for teaching stats I’ve recently shared within these groups.
How is the bootstrap confidence interval calculated?
The method of bootstrap confidence interval construction we use at high school level in NZ is to take the central 95 percentile of the bootstrap distr ..read more
teaching statistics is awesome – a blog for statistics teachers
5M ago
On Tuesday, my good friend Dr Michelle Dalrymple won this year’s Prime Minister’s Science Teacher award. It was so great to be able to fly down to Christchurch with Maxine Pfannkuch to watch the live streaming of the award ceremony with Michelle, her family and her colleagues at Cashmere High School. Michelle was the first mathematics and statistics teachers to win the prize, and it couldn’t have gone to a more deserving teacher!
You can read more about the awesomeness of Michelle in the links below:
https://www.pmscienceprizes.org.nz/2019-prime-ministers-science-teacher-winner/
https://www ..read more
teaching statistics is awesome – a blog for statistics teachers
5M ago
Actually, it’s not a new tool exactly, more a re-working of the existing modelling tool I’ve already shared on this blog, but with a new name and web location – the probability distribution explorer!
I developed the probability distribution explorer as part of my Masters research into teaching probability distribution modelling. The proposed teaching framework and the tool were developed in response to use of data for distribution modelling for AS91586, in particular the need for students to demonstrate use of methods related to the distribution of true probabilities versus distribution of mo ..read more
teaching statistics is awesome – a blog for statistics teachers
5M ago
Just a quick post to let you know that the mathstatic.co.nz site is hopefully only temporarily down, and I am working with my hosting company to get it back online ASAP. This affects the random redirect tool, the BYOP sampler tool and the experiment lab page, which will not be available until this gets sorted. I’ll update this post soon with a progress update!
UPDATE ONE
It seems the issue is that some overseas dodgy folk have been using the random redirect tool for fraudalent things like phishing scams. So, I’m going to restrict the URLs that can be used – which means analysis time to identi ..read more
teaching statistics is awesome – a blog for statistics teachers
5M ago
Today I demonstrated some in-class interactive activities that I had developed for my super large intro statistics lectures at a teaching and learning symposium. I’ve shared a summary of the activities and the data below.
Quick summary of the activity 1. Head to how-old.net upload or take a photo of yourself and record the age given by the #HowOldRobot 2. Complete a Google form (or similar) with your actual age and the age given by the #HowOldRobot 3. Explore the data collected using an awesome free online tool like iNZight Lite (click the link to jump through with the data) 4. Watch this sho ..read more