Dr. Michelle Everson is helping to catalyze new directions in statistics education through social media and the online classroom.
Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter provide not only distractions, but also great opportunities. Building on her work in online classrooms and her teaching experiments that incorporate social media, the University of Minnesota's Michelle Everson provides some tips and resources for using social media to teach some resources in the latest AMSTAT News. She candidly shares both the successes and failures that she's experienced using these approaches.
For a deeper dive, Michelle has also recently published an overview of the pedagogy of social media in the latest issue of Computers and Human Behavior, with coauthors Ellen Gundlach of Purdue University, and Jaqueline Miller of Ohio State University. Entering the maelstrom of social media is a bit easier with these thoughtful and seasoned teachers to guide you!
Great
statistics education thinkers from around the world came to sleepy
Two Harbors, Minnesota for a week of discussion, debate, and
reflection on the great issues in our field. The
theme of the
Eighth Forum
of the International Collaboration for Research on Statistical
Reasoning Thinking and Literacy (SRTL-8) was:
Reasoning
about uncertainty in the context of making informal statistical
inferences.
Our
explorations of students' reasoning about uncertainty included many
videos of students working through problems, and we explored the
process of informal inferences qualitatively and quantitatively among
K–12 and undergraduate students and teachers.
Twenty-four
international delegates attended the week-long event from nine
countries across the globe: Australia, Colombia, Germany, Israel, the
Netherlands, New Zealand, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United
States. The Forum provided the group of scholars with an opportunity
for dedicated discussion and debate of the theme, stimulated by
in-depth presentations and informal sharing of projects. A distinctive feature of SRTL's format is the emphasis on reflection and group discussion: a conference on student learning that is set up to foster deeper participant engagement and open-ended exploration than is usually available at lecture-oriented conferences.
Follow-up
events are to include a
book based on the scientific program, published through Catalyst
Press, informal gatherings at other upcoming statistics
education
meetings, and ongoing research
collaborations among many of the delegates. Plans are already
underway for the next meeting (SRTL-9) in Germany in 2015.
The
Forum was sponsored by The University of Minnesota, the Statistics
Education Section of the American Statistical Association, Springer
Publications, and Alakef Coffee Roasters.
Joan
Garfield and Elizabeth Fry from The University of Minnesota led the
local planning and organizing prior to the SRTL-8 gathering, supported
by Bob delMas (University of Minnesota) and Dani Ben-Zvi (University of Haifa, Israel), who
ensured that the forum ran smoothly. Thanks to the efforts of the
local organizers, participants were able to not only enjoy each
other’s creative efforts during the scientific program but also to
appreciate the local culture and natural
beauty of Minnesota’s north shore!
For
further information please contact the SRTL co-chairs:
Catalyst Press has just released the second edition of the book Statistical Thinking: A Simulation Approach to Modeling Uncertainty. The material in the book is based on work related to the NSF-funded CATALST Project (DUE-0814433).
It makes exclusive use of simulation to carry out inferential analyses.
The material also builds on best practices and materials developed in
statistics education, research and theory from cognitive science, as
well as materials and methods that are successfully achieving parallel
goals in other disciplines (e.g., mathematics and engineering
education).
The materials in the book help students:
Build a foundation for statistical thinking through immersion in real world problems and data
Develop an appreciation for the use of data as evidence
Use simulation to address questions involving statistical inference including randomization tests and bootstrap intervals
Why a cook on a statistics book? It is symbolic of a metaphor
introduced by Alan Schoenfeld (1998) that posits many introductory
(statistics) classes teach students how to follow “recipes”, but not how
to really “cook.” That is, even if students leave a class able to
perform routine procedures and tests, they do not have the big picture
of the statistical process that will allow them to solve unfamiliar
problems and to articulate and apply their understanding. Someone who
knows how to cook knows the essential things to look for and focus on,
and how to make adjustments on the fly. The materials in this book were
intended to help teach students to “cook” (i.e., do statistics and think
statistically).
The book is licensed under Creative Commons and is freely available on gitHub. If physical copies of the book are preferred, those are available for $45 at CreateSpace (or Amazon) in full color. All royalties from the book are donated to the Educational Psychology department at the University of Minnesota.
N.
Parker, Laura Ziegler, Robin Lock (of St. Lawrence University), and
Elizabeth Fry at the Advanced Placement Statistics Reading in Kansas City, Missouri
Every year, statistics teachers congregate to grade the Advanced Placement Statistics Exam, the final assessment given to high school students who completed the Advanced Placement Statistics course. This year, three of our Ph.D. students, N. Parker, Laura Ziegler, and Elizabeth Fry made it down to Kansas City for the reading, June 11–17.
Laura was a table leader, and N. was an "acorn"—the affectionate name given to first-time readers. AP Statistics gets bigger and bigger every year, with about 630 readers grading nearly 171,000 exams! In fact, this year there were enough exams that the AP readers conquered the "million question challenge": by grading more than a million responses.
We look forward to the day when enough students are taking AP Statistics that we face a two million question challenge!
Many of University of Minnesota's statistics education group sallied forth to wet, warm North Carolina to share and learn with statistics educators around the country at the US Conference on Teaching Statistics (USCOTS) 2013! The conference theme this year, "Change", is very dear to our group, and throughout the conference, we presented some of what we've learned about rebooting statistics education to serve students better. Along the way, we learned from the wide variety of perspectives and insights on the discipline from statisticians, education researchers, and teachers.
Right before the conference, we led two fully enrolled workshops:
Bob delMas (second from left), along with Ph.D. students Laura Ziegler, N. Parker, and Laura Le, taught a workshop on UMN's CATALST curriculum, which exclusively uses simulation and resampling methods to teach a post-secondary introductory statistics course.
Michelle Everson (right), with Master's student Ethan Brown, Ph.D. student Rebekah Isaak, and Master's student Anelise Sabbag, discussed practical tips and tricks for teaching a dynamic, engaging online statistics course.
Did we stop there? Of course not. The conference opened that night with a series of 5-minute presentations, including one by Bob delMas about his wizardly journey to improve statistics education.
Bob led a breakout session on Friday on evaluating new curriculum, using materials developed by the eATLAS project, along with Laura Le, Anelise Sabbag, and Elizabeth Fry.
Michelle, the perennial evangelist of online statistics education, participated in two more breakout sessions—one on time-management in online statistics courses, and another on the flipped classroom, as well as leading a lunch discussion group on planning the 2014 electronic Conference on Teaching Statistics (eCOTS).
Liz, N., and Ethan, who've been working with Joan Garfield to improve Wikipedia's coverage of statistics education, led another lunch discussion table to gather feedback and new collaborators on what should be included there.
The University of Minnesota's Catalysts for Change were inspired and motivated by this year's USCOTS, including the plenary speeches from Macalester College's Daniel Kaplan and Nicholas Horton (soon to be at Amherst College), North Carolina State University's Hollylynne Stohl Lee, Harvard University's Xiao-Li Meng, and University of Auckland's Chris Wild, and many more. The slides of these speeches can be downloaded from the conference website.
Here's all the Catalysts who could make it, smiling in the energizing glow of the shared passion for excellence in statistics education!
Michelle Everson's hard work as the new editor of the Journal of Statistics Education has borne fruit! The March issue is hot off the presses and freely available online. The issue includes new research on faculty views of statistics, a presentation of a delicious active learning exercise using M&M's, and a new regular feature on research for K-12 education by Tim Jacobbe of the University of Florida.
Michelle is also bringing her social media experience to help spread JSE's beautiful words to new realms. You can catch up with JSE on its facebook page and follow its Twitter feed, @JStatEd. The JSE team is also planning a series of webinars on CAUSEweb starting in June to give readers a chance to interact with the authors of recent JSE features.
You can read all about the JSE team's plans on the JSE page and read the new issue here.
How random is the iPod shuffle? Your students can investigate.
What does it mean for a process to be "random"? The CATALST introductory statistics course engages students in this question in the very first activity, written up in the latest issue of Teaching Statisticsby U of M's Laura Ziegler and Joan Garfield.
As Rob Gould points out, students have extensive prior experience with data and randomness. They do not enter the introductory statistics classroom as so many blank slates!
This situation presents both challenges and opportunities: we've heard from many students that it seems like some artists play more frequently than others on the Apple iPod's "shuffle" mode, which plays all songs in a supposedly random order.
Apple even ran an ad campaign in 2005 for the iPod Shuffle device with the slogan "Life is random":
But how random is it? Laura and Joan describe how the iPod shuffle activity elicits and refines student's prior conceptions of randomness. Students first examine 25 randomly generated playlists of 20 songs from a library of 80 songs. They discuss what rules they would use to flag a playlist as non-random. For instance, many students think that a playlist that has more than 5 songs by the same artist should be flagged.
We then give them five more playlists and give them an opportunity to refine their rules based on the additional information. Oftentimes, their rules will incorrectly flag one of these additional playlists and students may want to rethink their rules.
Finally, they get a chance to apply their rules to three playlists to make a decision about whether they have enough evidence to decide these playlists aren't random.
The process of the CATALST iPod Shuffle activity
Laura and Joan regard the full-class discussion, however, as quite crucial. Here is where students can hear the variety of different rules and face the logic and perception of what it means to be random. Students make all sorts of decisions that provide opportunities for rich conversations about the nature of chance: some students can provide convincing arguments that their rules are useful even when they incorrectly flag a playlist known to be random, while others are quick to say that their rules "prove" that the 3 final playlists were generated randomly.
This in-class activity is distributed in the Unit 1 Materials (zip) (Unit-01 > Student-Activities > 01-iPod-Shuffle.doc) on the CATALST materials page. The article also describes a follow-up homework assignment where students actually create a computer model of the process in TinkerPlots. This assignment is not publicly distributed, but interested teachers can contact the first author of the paper to find out more.
The publication is timely, because here at the U of M our students are just finishing up this first activity! It's a great way to get students started on the path to statistical thinking, and we always have fun hearing the creative things that students come up with.
