In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Neil J. Salkind <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >11/4/03
>Dear teaching colleague, >I could sure use your help. I was just asked to speak next January at >the National Institute for the Teaching of Psychology and would like >to ask you for a few minutes of your time. My presentation at NITOP is >titled, "What's difficult to teach in introductory statistics and how >to do it". Can you please take ten minutes and help me prepare for >this presentation by answering the following questions? >1. In your intro stat class, what three topics do you find most >difficult to teach your students? >2. How do you teach these topics? What techniques, strategies, ideas, >and tools help you? >3. What's the one coolest, most fun thing you do in your intro stat >class to help students learn? >Your help is tremendously appreciated and I will send you a copy of >the final presentation which should be ready sometime in January. Can >you please send your responses via email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and please >place the words "intro stat" in the subject line? Please be sure to >include your email address so I may send you a copy of the final >presentation. >Also, can you please forward this same letter to two other colleagues >of yours that teach intro stat? >Thanks (!) and very best wishes for continued success. The problem is that you are trying to teach statistics without the background needed to UNDERSTAND it. Without an understanding of probability concepts, NOT how to calculate probabilities in simple problems, no statistical procedure "makes sense". Means, medians, variances, significance tests, confidence intervals, etc., are dei ex machinae. The worst of all consists of transformations to normality. This destroys all structure, and in the real world, nothing is normal. Correlations are much harder to do inference with than covariances; statistics is not a collection of religious mantras, but is the problem of decision making under uncertainty. It must be modeled as such. -- This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University. Herman Rubin, Department of Statistics, Purdue University [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558 . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
