This article points out an unexpected but common misconception by students dealing with the exponential distribution.

This article reviews several attempts to define degrees of freedom, and offers some simple explanations of how they are derived and why they are used in various contexts.

This article illustrates the concept of statistical independence using the example of slot machines that may be played on multiple lines.

This article considers some issues in designing a course focusing on statistical concepts rather than memorizing formulae.

This article describes use of a novel statistical activity with primary school children.

An elusive probability paradox is analysed. The fallacy is traced back to improper use of a symbol that denotes at the same time a random variable and two different values that it may assume.

This article introduces the recently adopted Guidelines for the Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) and provides two examples of introductory statistics courses that have been redesigned to better align with these guidelines.

A practical hands-on classroom exercise is described and illustrated using the price of an item as dependent variable throughout. The exercise is well-tested and affords the instructor a variety of approaches and levels.

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

This article considers being inspired by statistics as both a learner and a teacher. It looks particularly at a task involving research of Minard's Map, a statistical representation, to create and present a statistical task for a learner. It describes how the use of imagery, and the enthusiasm that developed as the map and its context were…

Confidence intervals are difficult to teach, in part because most students appear to believe they understand how to interpret them intuitively. They rarely do. To help them abandon their misconception and achieve understanding, we have developed a simulation tool that encourages experimentation with multiple confidence intervals derived from the…

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.

This article presents a new approach to generalizing the definition of means. By this approach we easily obtain generalized means which are quite different from standard arithmetic, geometric and harmonic means.

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…

In teaching introductory quantitative methods in sociology, I have used a controversial survey of mortality in Iraq before and after the 2003 invasion to highlight to students the power of simple questionnaires, the role of ambiguity in statistics and the place of politics in the framing of statistical results. This brief report summarizes Roberts…