Recommended learning goals for students in introductory statistics courses include the ability to recognize and explain the key role of randomness in designing studies and in drawing conclusions from those studies involving generalizations to a population or causal claims (GAISE College Report ASA Revision Committee, 2016). The purpose of this…

Repeated sampling approaches to inference that rely on simulations have recently gained prominence in statistics education, and probabilistic concepts are at the core of this approach. In this approach, learners need to develop a mapping among the problem situation, a physical enactment, computer representations, and the underlying randomization…

In observational studies, selection bias will be completely removed only if the selection mechanism is ignorable, namely, all confounders of treatment selection and potential outcomes are reliably measured. Ideally, well-grounded substantive theories about the selection process and outcome-generating model are used to generate the sample of…

This study focuses on the development of four tertiary introductory statistics students' informal inferential reasoning while engaging in data driven repeated sampling and resampling activities. Through the use of hands-on manipulatives and simulations with technology, the participants constructed empirical sampling distributions in order to…

This study assessed the availability and use of ICT-based Instructional tools in selected medical colleges in Ogun State, Nigeria. This study adopted a descriptive survey research design. The population to be studied is medical lecturers (328), clinical instructors (42) and laboratory technologist (92) from Ben Carson Snr. Medical School, Babcock…

We surveyed researchers in the health and exercise sciences to explore different areas and magnitudes of bias in researchers' decision making. Participants were presented with scenarios (testing a central hypothesis with p = 0.06 or p = 0.04) in a random order and surveyed about what they would do in each scenario. Participants showed significant…

Statistical studies are referenced in the news every day, so frequently that people are sometimes skeptical of reported results. Often, no matter how large a sample size researchers use in their studies, people believe that the sample size is too small to make broad generalizations. The tasks presented in this article use simulations of repeated…

Estimation problems associated with the correlated-trait correlated-method (CTCM) parameterization of a multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) matrix are widely documented: the model often fails to converge; even when convergence is achieved, one or more of the parameter estimates are outside the admissible parameter space. In this study, the authors…

The results of a simulation conducted by a research team involving undergraduate and high school students indicate that when data is symmetric the student's "t" confidence interval for a mean is superior to the studied non-parametric bootstrap confidence intervals. When data is skewed and for sample sizes n greater than or equal to 10,…

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…

Recently, researchers have investigated differences in decision making based on description and experience. We address the issue of when experience-based judgments of probability are more accurate than are those based on description. If description is well understood ("transparent") and experience is misleading ("wicked"), it…

A procedure modelling ideal classical and quantum gases is discussed. The proposed approach is mainly based on the idea that modelling and algorithm analysis can provide a deeper understanding of particularly complex physical systems. Appropriate representations and physical models able to mimic possible pseudo-mechanisms of functioning and having…

Monte Carlo simulations are a classical tool to analyse physical systems. When unlikely events are to be simulated, the importance sampling technique is often used instead of Monte Carlo. Importance sampling has some drawbacks when the problem dimensionality is high or when the optimal importance sampling density is complex to obtain. In this…

In this article we describe a semester-long project, based on the popular video game series Guitar Hero, designed to introduce upper-level undergraduate statistics students to statistical research. Some of the goals of this project are to help students develop statistical thinking that allows them to approach and answer open-ended research…

In a very large Introductory Statistics class, i.e. in a class of more than 300 students, instructors may hesitate to apply active learning techniques, discouraged by the volume of extra work. In this paper two such activities are presented that evoke student involvement in the learning process. The first is group peer teaching and the second is…