Statistical tasks that can be solved in a variety of ways provide rich sites for classroom discourse. Orchestrating such discourse requires careful planning and execution. Five specific practices can help teachers do so. The five practices can be used to structure conversations so that coherent classroom narratives about solutions to tasks may be…

Students have intuitive notions of the meaning of variability; some may see variability as how values in a set vary from each other. This article provides a measure of variability that is based on that conception. We introduce this new measure and a method for calculating it. Finally, we prove that this measure is equivalent to the population…

This article describes an interactive way to help students learn to evaluate central tendency measures using a fictional story. The use of humour and fictional dire consequences may increase student understanding and engagement while reducing anxiety.

This article considers prototype data sets that attain lower and upper bounds on the standard deviation in terms of the range.

A classroom practical exercise exploring the reliability of a basic capture-mark-recapture method of population estimation is described using great whale conservation as a starting point. Various teaching resources are made available.

This article reports on a delicious finding from a recent study claiming a causal link between dark chocolate consumption and blood pressure reductions. In the article, I provide ideas for using this study to whet student appetites for a discussion of statistical ideas, including experimental design, measurement error and inference methods.

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…

This article presents two different approaches to studying the accuracy and precision of a measurement.

The mean and variance of the number of turning points in random permutations are evaluated. These results are applied to a test of randomness of fluctuations.

This article describes an activity through which students collect data and explore ways to display them through graphs and charts. It also motivates various summary measures for location, spread and shape. Finally, it gives an introduction to concepts of validity, reliability and unbiasedness.