The Rice Virtual Lab in Statistics

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Many concepts in statistics are abstract and difficult to teach, especially to non-science-majors. The goal of the Virtual Lab in Statistics is to develop laboratory materials that promote hands-on student-centered learning of statistics and, as a result, increase students' understanding of concepts in statistics as well as their motivation for learning statistics. The emphasis is on topics that have important applications in the social sciences; special attention is paid to techniques pertaining to the analysis of data from experiments and to the use of exploratory graphical tools. The proposed laboratory provides an integrated set of materials and activities for use in undergraduate-level statistics classes. The materials consist of (a) case studies that include data from real experiments, (b) interactive computer simulations of important statistical concepts, (c) detailed discussions and explanations of statistical issues related to the case studies and the simulations, and (d) a set of statistical experiments that students can undertake to discover important statistical relationships and principles. A tool kit allowing instructors to design their own simulations has also been developed. *