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…

Chocolate chip cookies are used to illustrate the importance and effectiveness of control charts in Statistical Process Control. By counting the number of chocolate chips, creating the spreadsheet, calculating the control limits and graphing the control charts, the student becomes actively engaged in the learning process. In addition, examining…

This article describes how practice problems for the actuarial examination in probability can be used to encourage active, collaborative learning. (Contains 1 table.)

Two contestants debate the notorious probability problem of the sex of the second child. The conclusions boil down to explication of the underlying scenarios and assumptions. Basic principles of probability theory are highlighted.

This article presents engaging interactive hypothesis tests which can be conducted with students very efficiently.

This article tackles the problem of what should be done with real textual data that are contaminated by errors of recording, particularly when the data contain words that are misspelt, unintentionally or otherwise. (Contains 5 tables and 2 figures.)

This article advocates biased spinners as an engaging context for statistics students. Calculating the probability of a biased spinner landing on a particular side makes valuable connections between probability and other areas of mathematics. (Contains 2 figures and 1 table.)

This article illustrates the importance of one's initial thoughts in problem solving through an entertaining example.

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.

The Venn diagram is suggested as a graphical solution to conjunction fallacies and a modification of it is suggested to more fully communicate set relations.

This article addresses an important problem of graphing quantitative data: should one include zero on the scale showing magnitude? Based on a real time series example, the problem is discussed and some recommendations are proposed.

In this article, the authors focus on hypothesis testing--that peculiarly statistical way of deciding things. Statistical methods for testing hypotheses were developed in the 1920s and 1930s by some of the most famous statisticians, in particular Ronald Fisher, Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson, who laid the foundations of almost all modern methods of…

When people speak of "the Law of Gravity" they are generally referring to what is more specifically known as "Newton's Law of Gravitation." This law states that the gravitational force (that is, the mutual attraction) between any two physical bodies is directly proportional to the product of their individual masses and inversely proportional to…

In this article I present an activity introducing statistical concepts to engineering students to help them develop inductive reasoning and problem-solving skills.