Communication and collaboration are key science competencies that support sharing of scientific knowledge with experts and non-experts alike. On the one hand, they facilitate interdisciplinary conversations between students, educators, and researchers, while on the other they improve public awareness, enable informed choices, and impact policy…

'QuantCrit' (Quantitative Critical Race Theory) is a rapidly developing approach that seeks to challenge and improve the use of statistical data in social research by applying the insights of Critical Race Theory. As originally formulated, QuantCrit rests on five principles; 1) the centrality of racism; 2) numbers are not neutral; 3) categories…

The game of baseball provides an interesting laboratory for experimenting with mechanical phenomena (there are many good examples in "The Physics Teacher," available on Professor Alan Nathan's website, and discussed in "Physics of Baseball & Softball"). We have developed a lab, for an introductory-level physics course, that…

In this article, the authors discuss the use of Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) statistics to teach the concept of price elasticity of demand in an introduction to economics course. By using real data in its computation, they argue that instructors can create a value-adding context for illustrating and applying a foundational concept in…

With the ease and automation of data collection and plummeting storage costs, organizations are faced with massive amounts of data that present two pressing challenges: technical analysis of the data themselves and communication of the analytics process and its products. Although a plethora of academic and practitioner literature have focused on…

The work of Harris and Martin (2012) on student motivations for choosing to complete online courses provides information on an important area of development within post-secondary education. As noted by the authors, online learning is an expanding field and learning more about why students choose online courses and their experiences in such courses…

For many years, students have been taught to visualise data by drawing graphs. Recently, there has been a growing trend to teach statistics, particularly statistical concepts, using interactive and dynamic visualisation tools. Free down-loadable teaching and simulation software designed specifically for schools, and more general data visualisation…

Data visualization is the term used to describe the methods and technologies used to allow the exploration and communication of quantitative information graphically. Data visualization is a rapidly growing and evolving discipline, and visualizations are widely used to cover politics. Yet, while popular and scholarly publications widely use…

Descripting Statistics provides methodology and tools for user-friendly presentation of random data. Among the summary measures that describe focal tendencies in random data, the mode is given the least amount of attention and it is frequently misinterpreted in many introductory textbooks on statistics. The purpose of the paper is to provide a…

As the availability of high-throughput data-collection technologies, such as information-sensing mobile devices, remote sensing, internet log records, and wireless sensor networks has grown, science, engineering, and business have rapidly transitioned from striving to develop information from scant data to a situation in which the challenge is now…

Economic data play an important role in the study of macroeconomics. Teaching with data through interactive classes can engage students more fully in the learning process. Although the pedagogy of teaching with data has been widely applied in the undergraduate science classroom, its extension to the economics classroom is rarely discussed. This…

This article illustrates using carbon emissions data in an introductory statistics assignment. The carbon emissions data has desirable characteristics including: choice of measure; skewness; and outliers. These complexities allow research and public policy debate to be introduced. (Contains 4 figures and 2 tables.)

The learning sequence described in this article was developed to provide students with a demonstration of the development of box plots from authentic data as an illustration of the advantages gained from using multiple forms of data representation. The sequence follows an authentic process that starts with a problem to which data representations…

Immigrant youth who are designated as English language learners in American schools--whom we refer to as "emergent bilinguals"--are increasingly framed by numerical calculations. Utilizing the notion of assemblage from actor-network theory (ANT), we trace how emergent bilinguals are discursively constructed by officials, administrators,…

An in-class activity is described that can be used not only to motivate hypothesis testing, but also to understand and compute the p-value and power in a statistical test. (Contains 3 figures.)