This paper discusses a concept that we call "'m'-tile means," which are the arithmetic mean of data values that break a data set into "m"-1 equal parts. Studying "m"-tile means can engage students' critical thinking skills and demonstrate the concepts underlying commonly used measures of central tendency, and so they…

In an increasingly data-driven world, facility with statistics is more important than ever for our students. At institutions without a statistician, it often falls to the mathematics faculty to teach statistics courses. This paper presents a model that a mathematician asked to teach statistics can follow. This model entails connecting with faculty…

Facebook provides businesses and organizations with copious data that describe how users are interacting with their page. This data affords an excellent opportunity to turn introductory statistics students into consultants to analyze the Facebook data using descriptive and inferential statistics. This paper details a semester-long project that…

We describe a semester-long project for an introductory statistics class that studies the broken windows theory of policing and the related issues of race, policing, and criminal justice. The most impactful feature of the project is the data-collection phase, in which students attend and observe a public arraignment court session. This "Court…

We present several modules that address social justice issues in an introductory statistics course. The activities consider possible disparities of housing location, language spoken at home, and job sector as they relate to, respectively, access to healthy foods, air pollution via proximity to traffic, and health concerns via proximity to fracking…

The inverted classroom allows more in-class time for inquiry-based learning and for working through more advanced problem-solving activities than does the traditional lecture class. The skills acquired in this learning environment offer benefits far beyond the statistics classroom. This paper discusses four ways that can make the inverted…

We discuss an upper division applied statistics course that has been structured to satisfy our college's writing intensive requirements within the mathematics major. In this course, students complete two projects, performing both a statistical survey and a controlled experiment, and then write up their work on each project in a formal paper. After…

For some students, using the method of cross sections to find the volume of a solid is difficult to understand because of the abstraction involved. This paper demonstrates a fun way for students to visualize the method of cross sections. Although a fun activity, the paper implicitly conveys the importance of connecting theory and experiment.…

If we let all students at Ithaca College be our population, then our Office of Institutional Research can provide us with various parameters about this population. For example, we can obtain parameters regarding SAT scores, birth month, and GPA. Each student samples from the population and we compare their results to the parameters. This allows us…