9354419 Wackerly Many of the students who register for college-level introductory statistics courses have relatively weak backgrounds in mathematics and, more importantly, poor quantitative skills. Although many of these courses have been developed with only high school level algebra as a pre-requisite, the typical content of these courses is really rather sophisticated. Students are expected to understand concepts such as: conditional probability, Bayes' Rule, independence, sampling distributions of statistics, confidence intervals and tests of hypotheses. The level of student understanding of these (nonquantitative) students depends upon how well they are able to envision what might happen if a process (sample, computation, etc.) were repeated over-and-over. This project will focus on the use of the computer as a device for illustration and "discovery" of important concepts that students have difficulty grasping. Rather than imagine what might happen if a process were repeated over-and-over, the computer can be used to show the students what actually DOES happen. The computer demonstrations are a tremendous aid in classroom presentations of the concepts and are also very valuable in the hands of students, where they can discover important facts and concepts for themselves. This project will produce (a) the demonstration software in topic modules for Macintosh computers, and (b) manuals for instructor and student use of the software. Student learning and attitudes will be evaluated.
