WISE Stuff

A key motivation for developing the WISE site is to take advantage of the incredible resources freely available on the Internet and the special interactive capability that it provides. Dynamic applets allow students to try their own ‘What if…’ scenarios. Yet to be most effective, students need guidance and access to help.

Below are some resources for teaching and learning statistics. We will continue to add these resources in this section and welcome your suggestions for additional topics.

Last updated: August 12, 2009

Using WISE Tutorials

Each WISE tutorial includes suggestions for how that tutorial may be used for instruction. The tutorials are modular to provide flexibility. These tutorials cover introductory statistics concepts such as hypothesis testing, sampling distributions, and statistical power.  Most tutorials feature an interactive applet that allows students to simulate statistical techniques such as sampling in order to see how different parameters affect relevant statistics.

The tutorials can be used as laboratory exercises with faculty supervision or they can be assigned as independent homework. Some tutorials have worksheets and follow-up questions that students can turn in for faculty evaluation.

The tutorials are designed to supplement traditional teaching materials, addressing specific topics that are difficult to present with traditional classroom technologies. The tutorials promote self-paced learning and to provide a means for advanced students to review concepts.

Instructors' Notes explain how to best use the tutorials in class settings:

• Sampling Distribution of the Mean
• Central Limit Theorem
• Hypothesis Testing
• Power
• Signal Detection Theory

Using WISE Applets

The WISE applets can be used for classroom demonstrations separately from the tutorials,

You may enlarge displays of applets by decreasing screen resolution. This may come in handy when using applets for demonstrations. Changing your screen resolution may re-arrange items on your desktop.

Tips for Using Applets for Demonstrations:

• Sampling Distribution of the Mean Applet
• Power Applet

Excel Downloads

Statistical Distributions

StatWISE Distributions is an Excel workbook that replaces tables for common distributions, including z, t, F, chi-square, and binomial. StatWISE is superior to tables because it allows more possible values than are included in tables.

Demonstrations Using Excel

• Failure of the t-test (revised)
• t vs. Z demonstration

Short Teaching Papers on Selected Topics

• Introduction to One-Way ANOVA
• Introduction to Multiple Regression
• Introduction to Resampling

Quick Guides

Downloading Data from ICPSR

The Inter-Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) website offers datasets on topics such as the census, health, history, sociology, and education. The WISE Quick Guide supplements information from ICPSR on downloading data in SPSS format.

Enlarge Applet Displays for Demos

To enlarge displays of applets for presentations or demonstrations, you may decrease screen resolution. Changing your resolution, however, may re-arrange items on your desktop.

Selected WISE Publications

Aberson, C. L., Berger, D. E., Emerson, E. P., & Romero, V. (1997) WISE: A web interface for statistics education. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 29, 217-221.

Aberson, C. L., Berger, D. E., Healy, M . R., Kyle, D., & Romero, V. L. (2000). Evaluation of an interactive tutorial for teaching the Central Limit Theorem. Teaching of Psychology, 27, 289-291.

Aberson, C. L., Berger, D. E., Healy, M. R., & Romero, V. (2001) Teaching statistics with web-technology: The WISE project. Syllabus, 14(7), 43-45.

Aberson, C.L., Berger, D.E., Healy, M.R., & Romero, V.L. (2002). An interactive tutorial for teaching statistical power. Journal of Statistics Education [online], 10 (3).

Aberson, C.L., Berger, D.E., Healy, M.R., & Romero, V.L. (2003). Evaluation of an interactive tutorial for teaching hypothesis testing concepts. Teaching of Psychology, 30, 76-79.

Healy, M.R., Berger, D.E., Romero, V.L., Aberson, C.L., & Saw, A. (2002). Evaluating JAVA applets for teaching on the Internet. Proceedings of the Scuola Superiore G. Reis Romoli Advances in Infrastructure for e-Business, e-Education, e-Science, and e-Medicine on the Internet International Conference.

Romero, V. L., Berger, D. E., Healy, M. R., & Aberson, C. L. (2000). Using cognitive learning theory to design effective on-line statistics tutorials. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 32, 246-249.

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