The least squares method of fitting a line is not one that naturally occurs to students. We present three tasks to understand student views on how lines may be fit.

This note shows how some density functions for continuous probability distributions can be constructed in a transparent manner to help students appreciate their development.

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.

Distributions are the basis for an enormous amount of theoretical and applied work in statistics. While there are formal definitions of distributions and many formulas to characterize them, it is important that students at first get a clear introduction to this basic concept. For many of them, neither words nor formulas can match the power of a…

We provide an overview of "EarlyStatistics," an online professional development course in statistics education targeting European elementary and middle school teachers. The course facilitates intercultural collaboration of teachers using contemporary technological and educational tools. An online information base offers access to all of the course…

This article describes an interactive activity that involves students participating in a memory recall test. Data collected from the activity may be used to illustrate the one-sample t test or one-sample sign test. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

It is important to avoid ambiguity with numbers because unfortunate choices of numbers can inadvertently make it possible for students to form misconceptions or make it difficult for teachers to tell if students obtained the right answer for the right reason. Therefore, it is important to make sure when introducing basic summary statistics that…

This article provides real life examples that can be used to explain statistical concepts. It does not attempt to be exhaustive, but rather, provide a few examples for selected concepts based on what students should know after taking a statistics course. (Contains 2 tables.)

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 Assessment Resource Tools for Improving Statistical Thinking (ARTIST) Web site was developed to provide high-quality assessment resources for faculty who teach statistics at the tertiary level but resources are also useful to statistics teachers at the secondary level. This article describes some of the numerous ARTIST resources and suggests…

Showing simply how statistical thinking can help in weighing evidence and reaching decisions can be useful both as an introduction to an extended presentation of statistical theory and as an introduction to a looser discussion of the nature and value of data.

This article describes a fun activity that can be used to help students make links between statistical analyses and their real-world implications. Although an illustrative example is provided using analysis of variance, the activity may be adapted for use with other statistical techniques.

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 describes how a demonstration of statistical (or other) software can be recorded without expensive video equipment and saved as a presentation to be displayed with software such as Microsoft PowerPoint. Work carried out on a tablet PC, for example, can also be recorded in this fashion.

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