Common sense is a dynamic concept and it is natural that our (statistical) common sense lags behind the development of statistical science. What is not so easy to understand is why common sense lags behind as much as it does. We conduct a survey among Japanese students and provide examples and tentative explanations of a number of statistical…

Take a family of independent events. If some of these events, or all of them, are replaced by their complements, then independence still holds. This fact, which is agreed upon by the members of the statistical/probability communities, is tremendously well known, is fairly intuitive and has always been frequently used for easing probability…

Using the famous Birthday problem, we present here a practical activity that allows students to perceive the basic reasoning behind simulation and explore its potential. Through a playful approach with probabilities, students are led along a path that illustrates difficulties with intuition and introduces them to theoretical results for sample…

This article describes an assessment activity that can show students how much they intuitively understand about statistics, but also alert them to common misunderstandings. How the activity can be used formatively to help improve students' conceptual understanding of analysis of variance is discussed. (Contains 1 figure and 1 table.)

In recent years English newspapers have started featuring a number of puzzles other than the ubiquitous crossword. Many of the puzzles are of Japanese origin such as Sudoku, Kakuro or Hidato. However, one recent one is very English and is called variously Cross-code, Alphapuzzle or some other name. In this article, it will be known as Codeword.…

The perspective of the naive intuitive statistician is outlined and applied to explain overconfidence when people produce intuitive confidence intervals and why this format leads to more overconfidence than other formally equivalent formats. The naive sampling model implies that people accurately describe the sample information they have but are…

The fortunes of chance and data have fluctuated in the mathematics curriculum in Australia since their emergence in the National Statement in the early 1990s. Their appearance in Australia followed closely on similar moves in the United States. In both countries the topics, taken together, were given a section status equal to other areas of the…

An activity in a college statistics class had students go to a field of grass and clover and use a variety of estimation, probability, sampling, distribution, and calculation techniques for determining the number of flowers in the field. The activity focused on the discovery process, encouraged abstract reasoning, and was pleasurable. (MSE)