Professional Development

This page provides general resources for teaching statistics. Currently, the page contains descriptions and links for a variety of web resources available to statistics teachers.

• APA Office of Testing and Assessment
• Information for Early Career Quantitative Psychologists
• International Test Commission

Statistical Thinking (University of Baltimore)

This page, by Dr. Hossein Arsham, provides detailed tutorials on an enormous array of statistical topics, including narrative, formulas, diagrams, and links to selected web-based calculators. The site is said to be for business/managerial topics, but it would appear to be useful for learning statistics, regardless of discipline.

StatPages - Hundreds of online calculators

Retired professor John C. Pezzullo has compiled a gigantic set of links to online statistical calculators (380 calculating pages and over 600 links overall). Some of the online calculators allow input of raw data, whereas others will accept sample statistics (e.g., means, SD's, frequencies) and provide statistical tests (e.g., t, chi-square). For the kinds of specialized statistical tests that researchers generally had to do by hand calculation in yesteryear, such as comparing correlation coefficients, online calculators are now available.

Rice Virtual Lab in Statistics

Like other pages, the Rice Virtual Lab provides tutorials and calculators. Other features that are unique (or relatively so) to the Rice page include interactive, animated activities to demonstrate statistical concepts (e.g., for correlations with restriction of range, the user can set the boundaries of data values and see what happens to the value of r), and case studies of experiments and their data analyses.

StatSoft Electronic Textbook

This site provides tutorials on a wide array of statistical topics, with a generous supply of diagrams (some of them interactive).

American Statistical Association

This venerable organization (founded in 1839) is a major home for statisticians. Although much of the scholarship of ASA's journals and meetings covers "pure" statistics, the organization also has more applied sections, including those on health, sports, and methodology.

Journal of Statistics Education

One of ASA's journals, JSE provides substantive free online articles on the teaching of statistics, as well as an archive of small, "real world" datasets for instructors to use in their stat classes.

Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education (CAUSE)

This NSF-funded organization, which grew out of an ASA initiative, lists four areas in which it aims to advance undergraduate statistics education, "resources, professional development, outreach, and research." In connection with CAUSE, national conferences on the teaching of statistics have been hosted biennially (odd-numbered years) since 2005, with the 2011 conference scheduled for North Carolina. In addition, CAUSE provides a number of web-based resources including classroom activities and "webinars" (seminars, in which the audio and slides are made available live and in archived form).

Principles of Learning Statistics

This site provides pedagogical advice to statistics instructors, drawing upon empirical findings on how students learn.

Assessment Tools for Statistical Literacy

This NSF-funded project focuses on assessment of students' learning of statistics. The site provides a repository of assessment ideas and measures, including test items, surveys, and projects students can do.

Quantitative Reasoning University

This site provides a list of readings (many of them from popular media) to further statistical understanding, as well as a list of 10 questions that savvy statistical consumers would want to ask.

WISE — Web Interface for Statistics Education

This resource from Claremont Graduate University provides self-guided interactive tutorials.

International Association for Statistics Education

This organization serves the international statistics-education community, offering publications, conferences and other resources.

"As a graduate student, I took a course on the general use of metaphor in science. It struck me that drawing such parallels among things that exist in nature, or “kinds,” the precise terms created to capture the essence of the “kinds,” and the imprecise (but rich-by-analogy) metaphors used to represent the relations between them, might be beneficial in my teaching. One clearly runs the risk of imprecision and, but with rare exception, all good metaphors eventually fall apart. However, a good metaphor or analogy taps existing knowledge structures about how a set of things relate, thereby aiding in learning the precise “term” for the “kind” and the relational nature among the “terms” for the “kinds.”"

- Todd Little, APA Div. 5

"I personally believe that we are all latent scientists of sorts, if only at an informal level. We each go about making hypotheses about everyday events and situations, based on more or less formal theories. We then collect evidence for or against these hypotheses and make conclusions and future predications based on our findings. When this process is formalized and validated in well-supported environments, the opportunity for a major contribution by a well-informed individual becomes much more likely. Further, this is accompanied by a deeply felt sense of satisfaction and reward. That has certainly been my experience."

- Lisa Harlow, APA Div. 5
Cohen Teaching Award Winner

"Instead of memorizing formulas, strive to understand the important concepts and think about ways that the concepts can be applied. In what situations is a particular statistic useful? How is the statistic interpreted? What assumptions must be fulfilled to interpret the statistic? When you read about an experiment in your field, consider how you would have designed it and how you would have analyzed the data. And check out your ideas by talking about them with your professor."

- Roger Kirk, APA Div. 5
Cohen Teaching Award Winner