Statistics is an integral part of the K-12 mathematics curriculum (age 5-18). Naturally, students construct misconceptions of what they learn. This article discusses The Bop It[C]Challenge, a review activity assesses student understanding and reveals their misunderstandings of statistical concepts. (Contains 3 figures and 1 table.)

The article illustrates how statistical content and pedagogical reasoning were taught in tandem in an undergraduate course. A typical day in the course is described. It is also suggested that practising teachers can benefit from strategies used in the course. (Contains 1 table and 3 figures.)

This article, written jointly by a mathematician and a barrister, looks at some of the statistical issues raised by court cases based on fraud involving chip and PIN cards. It provides examples and insights that statistics teachers should find helpful. (Contains 4 tables and 1 figure.)

This article describes an investigation of Buffon's coin problem and related problems with the aid of an applet. The problems are accessible at a variety of grade levels and facilitate making connections between geometry and probability.

This article describes a model for an interactive, introductory secondary- or tertiary-level statistics course that is designed to develop students' statistical reasoning. This model is called a "Statistical Reasoning Learning Environment" and is built on the constructivist theory of learning.

Our pig game involves a series of tosses of a die with the possibility of a player's score improving with each additional toss. With each additional toss, however, there is also the chance of losing the entire score accumulated so far. Two different strategies for deciding how many tosses a player should attempt are developed and then compared in…

This short article gives a geometrical interpretation of the relationship between the harmonic mean, the arithmetic mean and the self-weighted mean. (Contains 1 figure.)

Learning basic statistical concepts does not need to be tedious or dry; it can be fun and interesting through cooperative learning in the small-group activity of Statistics Poker. This article describes a teaching approach for reinforcing basic statistical concepts that can help students who have high anxiety and makes learning and reinforcing…

This article re-examines the much maligned piechart and provides justification for its use. It identifies common pitfalls when drawing piecharts in Microsoft Excel and offers advice on how to avoid them. (Contains 6 figures and 5 tables.)

This is the first of a series on data investigations in which the cycle of issues, planning, collecting, exploring, interpreting and discussing is reported for selected data investigations, with the data sets available on the Blackwell repository. The motivating issues for the investigation of this report were the manner in which people clasp…

A hands-on activity is described in which students attempt to measure something that they cannot see. In small groups, students estimate the number of marbles in sealed boxes. Next, students' estimates are compared with the actual numbers. Last, values from both the students' estimates and actual numbers are used to explain measurement theory and…

Standard distributions are ubiquitous but not unique. With suitable scaling, the graph of a standard distribution serves as the graph for every distribution in the family. The standard exponential can easily be taught in elementary statistics courses.

This article explores the relationships between several pairs of statistics kept on professional golfers on the PGA tour. Specifically, two measures related to the player's ability to drive the ball are compared as are two measures related to the player's ability to putt. An additional analysis is made between one statistic related to putting and…

This article describes how the mail merge facility within Microsoft Word can be used in conjunction with Microsoft Excel to generate personalized assignments for students at all levels.