Stat Chat for Tuesday 27 April 2010

Agenda

• 6:00 - 6:30, Dinner


• 6:30 - 7:00, Journal club. Two articles about active learning:
  
  
  1. Thomas Pfaff et al., Do Hands-On Activities Increase Student Understanding?: A Case Study Journal of Statistical Education, Nov. 2009
  2. David Weltman and Mary Whiteside, Comparing the Effectiveness of Traditional and Active Learning Methods in Business Statistics: Convergence to the Mean Journal of Statistical Education, Mar. 2010
  
  Frank Shaw will moderate the discussion.




• 7:00 - 7:30, Internet Resources: Michael Bulmer, University of Queensland (Australia), Life on an Island - a Simulated Population for Learning Statistical Reasoning
  It is important for students learning statistical reasoning to see data in context. One of the best ways of achieving this is to involve students in data production and so in the past ten years we have had first-year students undertake real experiments of their own choosing as part of our introductory statistics course. However in practice students are limited in what they can do. Many want to conduct experiments involving human subjects, requiring ethics approval, while even those not wanting to use humans may have general health and safety issues. Epidemiological studies have really not been possible at all.
  
  We have developed an open-ended virtual environment, the Island, to help overcome these limitations while still engaging students with study design and data collection. Students work with a population of virtual humans living on the Island and are able to conduct a wide variety of experiments with them as subjects. The islanders also live in villages, have ancestors and die from a range of diseases, allowing students to study the epidemiology of the island as well. In this presentation we will give a tour of this Island, highlighting some of the features and the issues, and sharing our experiences of using the Island in teaching and learning.
  
  
• 7:30 - 8:00, Main Event: Michelle Everson, Creating Web Applets from In-Class Activities to Foster Active Learning in the Online Statistics Classroom
  In a classroom setting, students can engage in hands-on activities in order to better understand certain concepts and ideas. Replicating hands-on activities in an online environment, however, can be a challenge for instructors. Recently, at the University of Minnesota, we created two web applets to incorporate into our undergraduate online introductory statistics courses, and these applets are meant to provide opportunities for students to engage in the kinds of activities commonly used in comparable classroom sections. One applet goes along with an activity where students use Post-it Notes in an effort to develop a more conceptual understanding of the mean and the median, and the other applet is meant to replicate aspects of the famous "Gummy Bears in Space" activity (presented in Schaeffer, Gnanadesikan, Watkins & Witmer, 1996). This talk will focus on the development of these applets and the ways in which the applets are currently used in our online courses.