Introduction

Welcome to ActivStats. This guide is designed to help you teach with ActivStats. This guide provides specific practical advice, describes the methods and pedagogical design of ActivStats, and provides additional background material.

ActivStats consists of approximately 250 individual Activities, each motivating, explaining, or reinforcing a single statistics concept. The Activities are organized so that students encounter them in a consistent order, but at a pace determined by the student. Students can learn a concept, apply it, and test their own understanding before proceeding to the next concept.

ActivStats is designed to complement statistics teaching in a variety of ways. Our goal has been to identify the "big ideas" of the introductory statistics course and to present them with innovative use of computer technology. Wherever possible, students discover important concepts for themselves. Every new method is immediately reinforced with applications to real data working with a statistics package. Interactive visualization tools give students an image to grasp to support the equations and definitions.

You can use ActivStats in several ways to support your course:

• ActivStats can be a co-text along with almost any standard statistics text in a lecture-based course. Students are introduced to many of the fundamental ideas of statistics with the ActivStats disk, and have regular homework assignments that use the computer. We have found that, in contrast with how students use traditional textbooks, students can work through ActivStats lessons before seeing the material in class. Used this way, ActivStats bears much of the burden of teaching terminology, equations, and methods, freeing lecture time for more examples, review, in-class exercises, and the "big picture" overview that helps student to integrate new ideas.
• ActivStats can be a secondary reference for students in a lecture-based course, possibly with specific Activities or computer-based homework assigned. In this model, students reinforce the concepts taught in lecture with visualization exercises on the computer and with practical applications of newly learned methods analyzing real data. ActivStats plays the role of a "Teaching Assistant in a Box," answering questions, providing additional review, and reiterating the important definitions and methods.
• ActivStats can be a source of in-class demonstrations and illustrations. The visualization tools are designed with bold, colorful parts that can be seen easily when projected on a screen.
• ActivStats can support a Distance Learning course, in which students attend no lectures and communicate with the professor via electronic mail. The narrated expositions provide a human touch missing from books and web pages. Links to sites on the World Wide Web encourage students to look beyond the material in front of them. Students can easily copy plots and tables from homework exercises that use Data Desk, and paste them into electronic homework solutions that they submit by e-mail.
• ActivStats can be a source of Activities in an activities-based discovery-learning statistics course. The ability of the computer to provide a "laboratory" for experimenting with randomness, probability, and inference is especially effective. ActivStats also provides experiments that students can perform on themselves and on others, and a statistics package in which to analyze the results.
• ActivStats can be used by individual students for review and study as a supplement to other materials. Because it hits the "big ideas," ActivStats provides a thorough review.

Structure

Depending on what textbook you couple ActivStats with, ActivStats presents a Lesson Book environment organized between 27 and 30 Lessons. Lessons are between 2 and 6 pages long. Each page introduces the subject of the lesson and offers text to introduce each of several (typically 3–5) Activities along with a short description of the activity. When the student clicks the Activity's icon, a window opens to present the Activity.

Activities are of several kinds:

• Videos show statistics in use in a wide range of applications, helping to explain to students why they should study statistics. The problems discussed in the videos are discussed further in the associated Activities. Some videos are from Against All Odds, Decisions Through Data, CNN, Thought Equity Motion, and the BBC, and some are original to ActivStats.
• Animated Activities present a brief narration synchronized with text and pictures on the screen to explain a new concept or method. Most Animated Activities pause every minute or so to ask questions and solicit student responses. Animated Activities focus on a single concept or method.
• Teaching Applets help students to understand concepts by working with them directly. Each Teaching Applet is introduced with a narration that explains the features of the applet and how it applies to a statistics concept, and then invites students to control the applet themselves. Students discover the sensitivity of some statistics (and the resistance of others) to outliers, what a correlation of 80% looks like, how a regression line can be fit by least squares, and many other fundamental concepts.
• Simulations help students discover and understand basic principles of randomness, probability, and inference. Students discover the law of large numbers, the central limit theorem, the reasoning of hypothesis testing, and more by performing experiments for themselves.
• Exercises in Data Desk (a full-function statistics package) allow students to apply newly learned skills immediately. Often the data analyzed is from the motivating video. Data Desk is included on the DVD as part of ActivStats.
• Self-test Quizzes allow students to check their understanding of new terms and concepts.

Animated Activities end with a bullet-list summary of the major points of that activity. On returning to the Lesson Book, students find the activity "checked off" on the page (and in the Table of Contents), and see the original introductory paragraph on the page replaced by the bullet list summary. Thus, as a student completes activities, the lesson book becomes a review of the major points of the course.

Although the book metaphor gives students a comfortable environment, it is easier to become disoriented on a computer than with a physical book. For this reason, the ActivStats environment offers additional amenities to help students navigate and learn:

• A dynamic Table of Contents shows the outline of the course at the lesson level, opens the current lesson to show each of its pages, opens the current page to show each of its activities, and indicates which activities have been completed with check marks. Students can navigate to any page by clicking on its title in the Table of Contents.
• A complete Glossary of terms can be opened by itself or entered by clicking on any hyperlinked term in the lesson book. Definitions are illustrated when appropriate, and have hyperlinks to other related glossary terms.
• A complete hypertext Index shows a list of places in ActivStats that reference each term. Clicking on elements of this list opens the Lesson Book to the corresponding place.
• Each lesson has extensive homework exercises. Many of these have datasets available at the click of a button for analysis in Data Desk. Some homework exercises are quoted (with permission) from David Moore's Active Practice of Statistics, from Alan Rossman's Workshop Statistics, and from Mario Triola's Elementary Statistics. Others are original, using data generated by the students in experiments they perform on themselves, using the interactive visualization tools, or pursuing datasets used in the expositions for deeper understanding.
• Each lesson has one or more Projects. Projects describe activities in which students or groups of students collect, generate, or discover on the Internet original data for analysis.
• Each lesson has a built-in Web page. If a Web browser and internet connection are available, students can open these pages with a click and be directed from there to sites on the Internet related to the material in that particular lesson.
• Students may choose the option of reading the script of any narration, either before listening to it or while listening to it. This is provided for students for whom English is not a primary language.
• ActivStats maintains a Student Progress File for each student in which students record their current progress in the course. When a student opens his or her progress file, individual preferences are restored, and the Lesson Book is opened to the page from the previously saved session.
• ActivStats includes Data Desk documentation integrated into the Lessons at appropriate places, and as a longer reference available from the Appendix.
• ActivStats offers Teaching Applets that provide standard statistics tables. These are presented at the appropriate places in the course, and also in the Appendix and Resources tab. These tables look like those found in standard texts, but provide graphical feedback and greater flexibility than possible with printed tables.

ActivStats comprises over 250 individual activities. A student who works through all of the Activities and does a typical selection of homework exercises will spend between 50 and 70 hours working with ActivStats and will cover the usual syllabus of an introductory Statistics course or high school Advanced Placement Statistics course.

Teacher Support

ActivStats provides several tools to facilitate teaching.

• The Preferences include the option of selecting one of several texts to match with ActivStats. When a text is selected, ActivStats' lessons are placed in the same order as the topic sequence of the selected text, and homeworks from that text are placed at the top of the homework lists in each lesson. (Homework numbering uses the abbreviation of the originating text, so regardless of the order, you can specify the exercises you want.)
• The Resources tab includes an annotated Dataset Browser for all of the datasets available on the disk. Datasets are indexed by their titles and by the subject they are used to teach. A button takes you directly to the use in the Lesson Book. The Dataset Browser makes it easy to find additional datasets for classroom examples, additional assignments, and examinations.
• The Resources tab includes links to all Videos, Teaching Applets, and Tables used in ActivStats. These can easily be incorporated into classroom lectures and discussions.

Level

ActivStats requires no more mathematics background than High School algebra. We have deliberately kept formal mathematics to a minimum to make the material in ActivStats widely approachable.