Data-Rich Experiences for Engaging Students’ Statistical Reasoning
Session Description
Experience activities designed to actively engage students in reasoning about statistical ideas by immersing them in data-rich experiences. You will leave with ideas and resources to help you implement the revised MN standards related to data and probability.
Slides
Links to Activities
Questions on Your Back
Engage your students with this meet and greet style activity to get them collecting and talking about data! Students will have secret questions taped to their backs. They will walk around and answer other student’s questions taped to their backs while collecting data on their own question. Once they have their data, they can create a visualization to help them determine what their question might be.
Spotify Playlists
Get students thinking about the statistical meaning of the word “random” with this activity highlighting a feature they are likely familiar with in Spotify - shuffle! Students get to test their ideas of what makes a truly “random” playlist while building to a formal definition of the word random in terms of probabilistic sampling.
Contagious Yawns
Students explore the research question from MythBusters - “are yawns contagious” in this activity designed to introduce dummy coding of categorical variables, hypothesis testing via simulation, and p-values.
Greyscale Photos by Anna Ferguson
These activities talk students through the features of distributions while engaging them in fun discussions while matching grey scale photos and their distributions.
Links to Curriculum
Adapting and Implementing Innovative Material in Statistics (AIMS)
This NSF-funded project developed lesson plans and activities based on innovative materials that have been produced in the past few years for introductory statistics courses. These lesson plans and student activity guides were developed to help transform an introductory statistics course into one that is aligned with the Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) for teaching introductory statistics courses. The lessons, which build on implications from educational research, involve students in small and large group discussion, computer explorations, and hands-on activities.
CATALST Curriculum
CATALST is an introductory statistics curriculum with a focus on modeling uncertainty with simulation methods. The free activities and textbook make use of TinkerPlots software to provide a visual aid to help students think through different ideas of inference. The Spotify and Contagious Yawn activities from above are from this cirriculum!
OpenIntro
OpenIntro provides high quality, open access resources for teaching statistics at the introductory level. The website provides several different free textbooks to choose from along with videos, slides, labs, data, and a blog!