Demonstrations

To help train our students to think quantitatively about their data, we’ve created a pair of web sites aimed at helping them consider statistical concepts in a practical way. The first is a statistics wiki, containing a series of short articles on a variety of concepts. Each article has a comments section, where students can ask questions, suggest improvements, and generally engage with each other and the authors. Moreover, students are invited to suggest new topics and even create new articles.
One of the major weaknesses in statistics teaching is a lack of actual practical work — students are taught the meaning of a concept (e.g. correlation), but don’t interact with actual data to see how it behaves in real world settings. This is a problem, because most quantities are derived assuming a large amount of well-behaved data, circumstances that are often not found in the real world. To help our students learn about the limitations of some classroom techniques, we have developed a series of interactive demos, which will let the students learn by playing with actual data.