Statistics Online Computational Resource for Education

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

Mathematical Sciences (21) This Phase 2 project is building on successful tool development and material validation of instructional resources for statistics education in an earlier Phase 1 project (DUE 0442992). The PI and colleagues are expanding the implementation of their educational innovations into diverse settings in undergraduate courses of probability and statistics with accompanying attention to development of faculty expertise in using the new tools. In particular, the project team is testing, validating, and disseminating: i) tools (applets, demos, GUI interfaces), ii) educational materials (activities, class notes, tutorials), and iii) resources (the Statistics Online Computational Resource Wiki, consulting). In addition, the project is providing guidelines for how these may be employed and extended by the users (instructors, students, researchers); and student performance evaluation studies are also being conducted. The intellectual merit of the project lies in its use of an open-source approach for the creation and development of freely available educational tools that are extensible and platform-independent. Furthermore, any newly developed instructional materials are extendable, factually correct, validated, and deployed on the web. This general, open-source approach allows for the creation of diverse topic-specific activities designed to impact student motivation, provide effective means of presenting new terminology, concepts or inter-variable relations and improve student learning. The broader impact of the project is felt both through its open distribution of resources and its design that allows faculty and other users to create their own resources, thereby adding to the larger collection.