This study contributes to the call for influencing practice by increasing attention to how learning environments can be designed to support learning in statistical inference. We report on a design experiment in secondary school (students 14-16 years old), that resulted in a set of lessons with the learning goal of teaching students how to apply…

As a foundational approach in inferential statistics, hypothesis testing (HT) is considered as one of the most challenging topics for teaching and learning. A promising approach is through the consideration of students' learning modalities, as demonstrated in vast applications; however, contentions that surround the use of learning modality in…

The natural experiment proposed in this article extracts three stories from boxes of "100 paper clips". The activity requires students to apply three lessons from inferential statistics, starting with a hypothesis test and including confidence intervals as well as tolerance intervals.

In their response to our paper, Nicholson and Ridgway agree with the majority of what we wrote. They echo our concerns about the misuse of inferential statistics and NHST in particular. Very little of their response explicitly challenges the points we made but where it does their defence of the use of inferential techniques does not stand up to…

White and Gorard make important and relevant criticisms of some of the methods commonly used in social science research, but go further by criticising the logical basis for inferential statistical tests. This paper comments briefly on matters we broadly agree on with them and more fully on matters where we disagree. We agree that too little…

Recent concerns about a shortage of capacity for statistical and numerical analysis skills among social science students and researchers have prompted a range of initiatives aiming to improve teaching in this area. However, these projects have rarely re-evaluated the content of what is taught to students and have instead focussed primarily on…

In this article, Strayer and Matuszewski present a six-phase strategy that teachers can use to help students develop a conceptual understanding of inferential hypothesis testing through simulation. As Strayer and Matuszewski discuss the strategy, they describe each phase in general, explain how they implemented the phase while teaching their…

This study assessed the utilization of ICT resources in teaching among business educators in tertiary institutions in south Nigeria. Two research questions and two null hypotheses guided the study. Descriptive survey research design was adopted for the study. The population and sample for the study comprised all 240 business educators in colleges…

The term "data snooping" refers to the practice of choosing which statistical analyses to apply to a set of data after having first looked at those data. Data snooping contradicts a fundamental precept of applied statistics, that the scheme of analysis is to be planned in advance. In this column, the authors shall elucidate the…

The study investigates (1) the effectiveness of using eLearning-embedded stories and pictures in order to improve learning outcomes for students and (2) how universities can adopt innovative approaches to the creation of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) resources and embed them in educational technology for teaching domain-specific content, such as…

A basic question of instructional interventions is how effective it is in promoting student learning. This paper presents a study to determine the relative efficacy of different instructional strategies by applying an educational data mining technique, learning decomposition. We use logistic regression to determine how much learning is caused by…

Regardless of the related discipline, students in statistics courses invariably have difficulty understanding the connection between the numerical values calculated for end-of-the-chapter exercises and their usefulness in decision making. This disconnect is, in part, due to the lack of time and opportunity to actually design the experiments and…

Offering perspectives in the teaching of statistics assists students, immersed in the study of detail, to see the leading principles of the subject more clearly. Especially helpful can be a perspective on the logic of statistical inductive reasoning. Such a perspective can bring to prominence a broad principle on which both interval estimation and…

Instructional alignment is the extent to which stimulus conditions match three instructional components. This paper demonstrates a new perspective in which instructional alignment generates larger effects in research and practice for less "cost" than other instructional constructs. (VM)

A mental model analysis was conducted with 27 graduate and 29 undergraduate students in the statistical hypothesis testing domain to determine the nature of relevant mental models that can be taught to novices. Results suggest the efficacy of using separate and diagrammatic strategies in teaching novices introductory hypothesis testing. (SLD)