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…

Statistical inference relies heavily on the concept of sampling distributions. However, sampling distributions are difficult to teach. We present a series of short animations that are story-based, with associated assessments. We hope that our contribution can be useful as a tool to teach sampling distributions in the introductory statistics…

This article proposes the use of the coefficient of determination as a statistic for hypothesis testing in multiple linear regression based on distributions acquired by beta sampling. (Contains 3 figures.)

The unexpectedness of the birthday problem has long been used by teachers of statistics in discussing basic probability calculation. An activity is described that engages students in understanding probability and sampling using the popular Facebook social networking site. (Contains 2 figures and 1 table.)

This article provides an easy derivation of updating formulae for the sample covariance and, by extension, for the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient.

This article describes a simulation activity that can be used to help students see that the estimator "S" is a biased estimator of [sigma]. The activity can be implemented using either a statistical package such as R, Minitab, or a Web applet. In the activity, the students investigate and compare the bias of "S" when sampling from different…

The sampling (probability) distribution for the sum of dice is presented graphically as a compelling demonstration of the Central Limit Theorem.

This article shows that when applying resampling methods to the problem of comparing two proportions, students can discover that whether you resample with or without replacement can make a big difference.

This article demonstrates that the variance of three or four observations can be expressed in terms of the range and the first order differences of the observations. A more general result, which holds for any number of observations, is also stated.

This article shows how R can be used to perform resampling with and without replacement.

Students often find the fact that a sample statistic is a random variable very hard to grasp. Even more mysterious is why a sample mean should become ever more Normal as the sample size increases. This simulation tool is meant to illustrate the process, thereby giving students some intuitive grasp of the relationship between a parent population…

Water quality experiments, especially the use of macroinvertebrates as indicators of water quality, offer an ideal context for connecting statistics and science. In the STAR program for secondary students and teachers, water quality experiments were also used as a context for teaching statistics. In this article, we trace one activity that uses…

Standard Microsoft Excel functions and the Excel Data Table facility are used in randomization applications using resampling with and without replacement.