Every day, students collect, organize, and analyze data to make decisions. In this data-driven world, people need to assess how much trust they can place in summary statistics. The results of every survey and the safety of every drug that undergoes a clinical trial depend on the correct application of appropriate statistics. Recognizing the…

This article presents activities appropriate for the first half of a general introductory statistics course. All activities revolve around the same data set collected early in the course. The activities require students to make decisions about how they should proceed. (Contains 2 tables and 5 figures.)

Critical to many science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) career paths is mathematical modeling--specifically, the creation and adaptation of mathematical models to solve problems in complex settings. Conventional standardized measures of mathematics achievement are not structured to directly assess this type of mathematical…

In this paper, we describe an in-class experiment that is easy to implement with large groups of students. The experiment takes approximately 15-20 minutes to run and involves each student completing one of four types of Sudoku puzzles and recording the time it takes to completion. The resulting data set can be used as a teaching tool at an…

This article reports on the affective challenges I experienced while attempting to develop a pedagogy of teacher education during my first three years in teacher preparation. Data were collected systematically over the course of the study in the form of written interpretive accounts of my experiences. Analysis of these accounts revealed how…

Regardless of the related discipline, students in statistics courses invariably have difficulty understanding the connection between the numerical values calculated for end-of-the-chapter exercises and their usefulness in decision making. This disconnect is, in part, due to the lack of time and opportunity to actually design the experiments and…