April 2022 Webinar Past, Present, Future of StatPREP
Thursday, April 21 4 pm to 5 pm (EDT), 3 pm to 4 pm (CDT), 2 pm to 1 pm (MDT), 1 pm to 2 pm PDT (MST)
Hosts: Kathryn Kozak and Ambika Silva
StatPREP started with the goal of convincing instructors that intro statistics courses should be data-centric! Over the course of the grant we gave participants access to free tools from StatPREP to help students learn introductory statistics concepts, including Little Apps along with tutorials that introduce RStudio. In this webinar, we will reflect on both what StatPREP has accomplished and what is on the horizon as we look towards the future.
March 2022 Webinar Three Ways to (Re)invigorate Your Teaching of Linear Regression
March 2, 2022, 5:30 pm to 6:30 pm EST, 4:30 pm to 5:30 pm CST, 3:30 pm to 4:30 pm CST, 2:30 pm to 3:30 pm PST
Learn three ways to invigorate or reinvigorate your teaching of linear regression in our upcoming webinar facilitated by Dr. Helen Burn from Highline College. The webinar is relevant whether you are still formulating your approach to teaching linear regression or if you wish to give new strength or energy to your current approach. The session will be interactive and activity-based, leveraging the StatPREP Little Apps to demonstrate and apply ideas. However, the ideas shared and discussed in the webinar can be immediately applied to your statistics class whether or not your students have access to technology. Three ways to (re)invigorate your teaching of linear regression shared in the webinar are:
- Focus on the response variable and the guiding question: What predicts the explanatory variable?
- Increase students’ capacity to assess the suitability of a linear model through exploring and examining sample variability, model strength, and slope as effect size.
- Learn from the StatPREP team about what it means to be forward-thinking around the topic of linear regression and the different settings in which regression is used in practice.
Presenter: Dr. Helen Burn
February 2022 Webinar Visualization with RStudio using ggplot2
Tuesday, February 8 at 11:00 am EST, 10:00 am CST, 9:00 am MST, 8:00 am PST
This webinar demonstrated using the ggplot2 package for data visualization. The fundamentals of ggplot2 and creating graphs such as bar plots, histograms, density plots, scatter plots, and time series graphs were emphasized in the webinar.
Presenters: Joe Roith and Kathryn Kozak
Link to recording Please note captions are auto-generated by Zoom, so please pardon any spelling errors.
November 2021 Webinar Introduction to RStudo and Exploratory Data Analysis
Monday, November 8, 2021, 4:00pm EST, 3:00pm CST, 2:00pm MST, 1:00pm PST
This workshop introduced participants to RStudio using RStudio Cloud. In addition RStudio server and RStudio desktop were described. The introduction included packages and reading data into RStudio. Then there was an introduction to Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA).
Presenters: Joe Roith and Kathryn Kozak
Link to recording Please note captions are auto-generated by Zoom, so please pardon any spelling errors.
October 2021 Webinar An Introduction to Confidence Intervals: An Interactive Webinar
The StatPREP Little Apps are a collection of free, easy-to-use online tools that help students visualize the statistical concepts using real-world data.We will explore the StatPREP Little App for Confidence Intervals. In this interactive session, we will visualize the characteristics of a confidence interval, demonstrate what a confidence level is, resample data, and create side-by-side comparisons. These visualizations can be used to introduce the topic as well as in classroom assessments.
Presenter: Rona Axelrod
September 2021 Webinar Experiencing Sampling Variation Early and Often in an Intro Statistics Course
Using data centric lessons and visualization tools such as the “Points and Densities Little App” have supported my students’ understanding of the key role sampling variation plays in statistical investigation. I love overhearing “Hey, my sample looks different from yours!” It opens the door to explore whether there is still a consistent story to tell about a variable.
Presenter: Carol Howald
June/July 2021 Workshop Creating a Data Science Program at a Two-Year College
You may be contemplating creating a data science program at your institution, but you are not sure where to start. This recording features a panel discussion with several people who have created data science programs at their institutions. The focus was on community colleges because of the unique issue that community college faces with articulation and workforce development. However, all institution types could gain some insights to create a program at their institution, so all faculty at any college or university are invited to review the material and watch the recordings. This one day workshop was offered on Friday, June 4, 2021, and repeated on Saturday, July 31, 2021.
The recording of the June 4th panel discussion is available at the following links.
The recording of the July 31st panel discussion is available is at the following link.
February 2021 Resources for Teaching Statistics
Teaching an introductory statistics course, but you need some guidance. The ASA/MAA Joint Committee, the ASA/AMATYC Joint Committee, and the StatPREP grant all have resources to help you teach statistics. This webinar demonstrated the resources from each of these sources.
Presenters: Julie Hanson, Rebecca Wong, Kathryn Kozak, and Kari Lock Morgan
October 2020 Data Science in a Box
Our guest was Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, a highly regarded teacher and one of the authors of the OpenIntro textbooks as well as the online “Data Science in a Box” package of teaching materials. We talked with Mine about the upcoming new edition of the simulation-based OpenIntro textbook and how you can use it in your class. We also covered a range of topics, from remote teaching of statistics and data science to Mine’s (educated!) predictions about where intro stats is heading in the 2020s.
Presenter: Danny Kaplan.
September 2020 Using the Activities for the New Little Apps
In April 2020, a webinar presented the new StatPREP Little Apps. This webinar discusses several activities tailored to use the new Little Apps and how to use them in class.
Presenters: Kate Kozak, Danny Kaplan.
August 11, 2020 Preparing for the fall semester
There are many materials on the StatPREP site that can help you teach data-centric statistics. This webinar described some of these resources that are ready for Fall 2020.
August 7, 2020 Building Community in a Remote Learning Environment
A sense of belonging and community is still critical to ensure that students remain engaged and enthusiastic while being in a remote learning environment. Students may be accustomed to find a sense of belonging from interactions with their peers and classmates in a physical classroom setting. As instruction is delivered virtually, students may likely feel less connected, uncertain, or distracted in their new learning environment. Creating a virtual community is just as important for remote learning as it is in a physical classroom. This webinar presented suggestions to help educators reestablish a sense of belonging for their students.
Presenter: Ambika Silva
June 29/30, 2020 Introductory Statistics in the 2020s: A Virtual Workshop for Two-Year College Educators
This American Statistical Association workshop focused on ideas and activities for teaching introductory statistics in accordance with the American Statistical Association’s GAISE recommendations and “A World Beyond P < 0.05” initiative. Highlighted themes included multivariable thinking, data fluency, misconceptions and limitations of p-values, and alternatives to p-values such as effect sizes.
Presenters were Roxy Peck, Rob Gould, Danny Kaplan, Beth Chance, Jeff Witmer, and Kari Lock Morgan.
May 18, 2020 What Every Instructor Should Know About the Bootstrap
Statistical concepts such as sampling distributions, standard errors, and P-values are difficult for many students. A good way to get hands-on experience with these abstract concepts is using bootstrapping and permutation tests, and we’ll demonstrate using a variety of examples. Though bootstrapping has enormous potential in statistics education and practice, there are subtle issues and ways to go wrong. For example, the common combination of nonparametric bootstrapping and bootstrap percentile confidence intervals is less accurate than using t-intervals for small samples, though more accurate for larger samples. The goals of this talk are to provide a deeper understanding of bootstrap methods – how they work, when they work or not, which methods work better– and to highlight pedagogical issues.
Presenter: Tim Hesterberg & Kate Kozak
April 23, 2020 Little App Update
We celebrated the third anniversary of the StatPREP Little Apps by launching a brand new set of apps with a new look and new functionality. Among the changes are a dramatically increased choice of data sets (including those keyed to textbooks often used by StatPREP instructors) and the ability to upload your own CSV files, a feature that lets you freeze a display and show it side-by-side with the current display. The original apps continue to be available at their original web addresses, but we encourage you to switch to the new ones and try out their new capabilities.
Presenters: Jennifer Ward & Danny Kaplan
March 26, 2020 The p-value: Replacing 0.05 with Understanding
The American Statistical Association’s 2016 P-Value Statement and The American Statistician’s 2019 special issue “Statistical Inference in the 21st Century: A World Beyond p < 0.05” both provide a call for action and change regarding how p-values are taught and used. In particular, they discourage the focus on whether a p-value is less than a specific threshold (e.g. 0.05), and encourage a better understanding of what the p-value actually represents. This talk will discuss ways to replace “p < 0.05” with conceptual understanding of a p-value in introductory statistics courses.
March 13, 2020 StatPREP Webinar: Course Curricula & StatPREP
Danny Kaplan and Kate Kozak introduced the three new StatPREP companion tools for Statistics Using Technology by Kozak, OpenIntro Statistics by Diez, et al, and Elementary Statistics by Triola. Do you use one of these books in your introductory statistics classes? If so, watch the webinar recording to learn how StatPREP can help you teach data-centric stats! Even if you don’t use one of the listed books, you may find the materials helpful.
Presented by: Danny Kaplan and Kate Kozak
December 12, 2019 The Compact Guide to Classical Inference: Why?
In Dec. 2019, StatPREP.org started the serial publication of a short book for instructors: The Compact Guide to Classical Inference. (Note from March 2020: The full book is available here.](https://dtkaplan.github.io/CompactInference/)) Keeping in mind that StatPREP is about centering statistics education on real data, this book is an anomaly: the introduction of a reframed mathematical approach to statistical inference. The reframed approach unifies into a simple, single standard procedure all the inferential settings found in introductory statistics and carries forward to apply to “advanced” settings such as multiple regression.
Presenters: Donna LaLonde & Danny Kaplan
The webinar was a conversation between Donna and Danny about how the many formulae and probability tables of historical statistics can be unified into a single simple test statistic, F, and an expression for the confidence interval in terms of F.
November 5, 2019 Assessment Webinar
Assessment is an integral part of instruction, as it determines whether or not learning goals are being met and makes us ask, “Are students learning what they are supposed to be learning?” Learn how to use the StatPREP Little Apps to make meaningful assessments during this month’s webinar!
October 23, 2019 MAA Connect
Looking for ways to connect with other StatPREP participants across the country? Do you want to share the wonderful innovated data centric ways you’re teaching your intro stats course? Join the conversation on MAA Connect. This webinar shows you how to get onto MAA connect whether you’re an MAA member or not as well as going over the basics of MAA connect.
Do you have an unusually high pulse rate? How can a person find out? This webinar will present an activity developed for the Little App called “Common and Rare.” This activity is a group activity that is available to use in a class today. The webinar will show you how to use the activity and the Little App in an introductory Statistics course to introduce and investigate the concept of rare and common events utilizing the normal curve.
March 27, 2019 Using the Little App “Linear Models”
The webinar gave the first look at the redesign of the Little Apps. The “Linear Models” Little App allows teachers and students to pick between 4 different datasets and then particular variables to investigate a linear regression model between the variables. The webinar showed how to use the Little App in your courses to introduce and investigate regression.
February 22, 2019 Using the What’s Normal? Class Lesson to Introduce the Normal Distribution
The webinar presented a classroom lesson called “What’s Normal?” that models data which can be used to explain the normal distribution to your class. The lesson shows the connection between data and the empirical rule of the normal curve.
January 25, 2019 Introducing Your Students to Multivariable Data
This webinar was about introducing students to data. The webinar presented two classroom lessons that can be used to explain multivariable data to your class. The first, “A Lesson for the First Day,” is used to show your students how data can be used to answer questions. The second, “Using Google Spreadsheets,” has your students collect data in the classroom. Both of these activities can be completed early in the course.
October 26, 2018 Using Little Apps to teach Two-sample t
The webinar demonstrated how to use in class the Little Apps “Two-sample t,” “Proportions”, and “Sampling and resampling.”
Sept 7, 2018 Using StatPREP Little Apps to Teach Descriptive Statistics
This webinar focused on the nuts and bolts of designing a class lesson around using the little apps for teaching descriptive statistics. It included:
- Where to find the little apps
- How to use the little app to demonstrate center and spread
- Picking different response variables
- Showing mean and standard deviation in graphical output
- Showing 95% confidence interval to introduce the idea of inference
- Choosing an explanatory variable and then discussing difference in means
- Some comments on sample size
- Types of assessment that can be done
April 20, 2018 Getting a handle on ANOVA
Friday, April 20, 2018
This webinar is about ANOVA, seen from a perspective that we think makes it much easier to understand and is rooted in a display of data. will lead the webinar. Watch the recording to find out what you have been missing and how to become confident in teaching ANOVA with data. This was our first webinar about the Little Apps series, interactive displays of data designed to let you an your students explore a statistical method or idea. This webinar featured the app on one-variable ANOVA.
Presenter: Kate Kozak
Dec 1, 2017 Writing an interactive tutorial
An interactive tutorial is an effective way to provide access to data computing to students. Tutorials can be arranged so that a student needs nothing more than a web browser. Within a tutorial, you can pose multiple choice questions, display results of statistical calculations, and provide students with an R session in which they can do their own calculations (with as much or as little guidance from you as you want).
The first step in writing an interactive tutorial is to figure out what you want the tutorial to cover. In the webinar, we started by creating an Rmd file with some simple but authentic statistical content. Then, we added slots for multiple-choice questions and computations. Finally, we activated the components that turn an ordinary Rmd file into an interactive tutorial.
Presenter: Danny Kaplan
October 27, 2017 Using RStudio to manage your website and write course handouts
You can start teaching with StatPREP without having to set up any statistical software; all our tutorials are available through an ordinary web browser. But many instructors are interested in going deeper. In particular, we’ve had many calls for instruction on how to use RStudio to create your own documents or customize those available through StatPREP.
RStudio provides the means to write course notes, handouts, and even interactive tutorials. Together with GitHub, it lets you easily set up course-specific web sites and create materials for those sites. Oh … and since it built on the R software, it’s fully integrated with modern systems for data management, statistics, modeling, and even machine learning.
This webinar introduced RStudio with a focus on creating and updating course web sites and writing course handouts. We started with the RStudio editor, which enables you to revise documents or create new ones. Also covered: How to link your RStudio account to GitHub so that you can manage your course web site from within RStudio; and how to create documents for class handouts—simultaneously generating printable PDF and web versions.
September 29, 2017 Setting up your own course web site
A course web site is an essential resource for an instructor: it provides a place for you to post links to StatPREP lessons as well other tutorial material and data sets of particular interest to you and even your own course handouts. Many instructors have access to “course management software” systems such as Blackboard or Moodle to which students can log in and view a home page. We focused on another approach which requires no institutional resources and uses a completely free web service: GitHub. In the webinar, we went through the steps of setting up a GitHub account and a course “repository”“which serves a complete website with an address like
ProfAndrews.github.io/Stat4110(where you’ll customize the ID and course name to suit your situation). Then we demonstrated how to create a web page that can include links to StatPREP tutorials and other resources you choose, upload data sets so your students can easily access them, and all the other things that can make your course more accessible and engaging for students.