The treatment of kurtosis in textbooks is both sparse and contradictory with applications rarely discussed. To address this, an easily understood definition of kurtosis is introduced and important applications are demonstrated. Two different approaches to teaching kurtosis are presented based on a financial application.

This article details the results of a written test designed to reveal how education majors construct and evaluate histograms and frequency polygons. Included is a description of the mistakes made by the students which shows how they tend to confuse histograms with bar diagrams, incorrectly assign data along the Cartesian axes and experience…