Projects in Introductory Statistics Courses

Introductory statistics courses should incorporate unstructured projects where students themselves generate the problems they choose to study, gather their own data, analyze the information using suitable computer software, and communicate their findings in a report. This article describes my experience with projects in the context of a large lecture course where projects are carried out in groups. Special problems that arise with group projects are discussed. Several successful student projects are described.     

Easy Implementation of Writing in Introductory Statistics Courses

In the past decade there has been a substantial increase in the number of introductory statistics courses taught at the undergraduate level. Many have argued successfully for the extensive use of writing in such courses in an attempt to highlight the interdisciplinary role of statistics and acknowledge that a good statistician must also be good at summarizing his or her analyses to nonstatisticians. This point was made by Radke-Sharpe, who went on to add that incorporating writing demands time, energy, and creativity, but that it is usually well worth the effort. This article discusses the efforts made by the authors to include writing in their courses, and some of the techniques that made the writing process painless and productive for both students and faculty.     

The Use of Investigations in the Introductory Statistics Course

Reasons for including investigations in a first course in statistics are presented. Investigations create an environment of participation and give the student the opportunity to experience statistics in action. This participation highlights the interaction between science and statistics. Suggestions are made regarding the integration of investigations into a formal course environment. One investigation is presented in detail. Thirteen other investigations are outlined. Emphasis is placed on experiments that require minimal set-up time yet illustrate important statistical concepts.     

Statistics in Latin America

Statistics is a relatively new discipline in Latin America. At present only sparse information is available about the state of the statistical profession in Latin America. We present and summarize the available information about the job market; training, education, and research; professional societies and their activities; and so forth. We also share our hopes, concerns, and suggestions for the future.     

30年来我国财经类院校统计学专业本科课程设置的历史回顾与展望

 回顾改革开放以来我国财经类院校统计学专业本科课程设置的历史变迁,由此侧面反映我国统计教育不断发展完善的过程,并结合实际分析财经类院校统计学专业本科课程设置未来的发展方向,提出相关建议,以期促进新形势下我国统计教育水平的不断提高。     

Teaching Ethics in a Statistics Curriculum with a Cross-Cultural Emphasis

Like most professional disciplines, the ASA has adopted ethical guidelines for its practitioners. To promote these guidelines, as well as to meet governmental and institutional mandates, U.S. universities are demanding more training on ethics within existing statistics graduate student curricula. Most of this training is based on the teachings of Western philosophers. However, many statistics graduate students are from Eastern cultures (particularly Chinese), and cultural and linguistic evidence indicates that Western ethics may be difficult to translate into the philosophical concepts common to students from different cultural backgrounds. This article describes how to teach cross-cultural ethics, with emphasis on the ASA Ethical Guidelines, within a graduate-level statistical consulting course. In particular, we present content that can help students overcome cultural and language barriers to gain an understanding of ethical decision-making that is compatible with both Western and Eastern philosophical models. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.     

What Your Future Doctor Should Know About Statistics: Must-Include Topics for Introductory Undergraduate Biostatistics

The increased emphasis on evidence-based medicine creates a greater need for educating future physicians in the general domain of quantitative reasoning, probability, and statistics. Reflecting this trend, more medical schools now require applicants to have taken an undergraduate course in introductory statistics. Given the breadth of statistical applications, we should cover in that course certain essential topics that may not be covered in the more general introductory statistics course. In selecting and presenting such topics, we should bear in mind that doctors also need to communicate probabilistic concepts of risks and benefits to patients who are increasingly expected to be active participants in their own health care choices despite having no training in medicine or statistics. It is also important that interesting and relevant examples accompany the presentation, because the examples (rather than the details) are what students tend to retain years later. Here, we present a list of topics we cover in the introductory biostatistics course that may not be covered in the general introductory course. We also provide some of our favorite examples for discussing these topics.     

美国统计教育研究热点探析

本文对美国《统计教育杂志》（Journal of Statistics Education）近十年（2000-2009）发表的学术论文进行了统计分析。结果表明,近十年来美国统计教育研究在＂统计教育理论探索＂、＂新手段在统计教育中的应用＂、＂统计在实际生活中的应用＂三大领域发表论文相对较多,占全部论文的81.9%。本文对此三大热点问题进行了归类和分析,旨在把握美国统计教育研究的热点和趋势,使其对我国的统计教育研究具有一定的借鉴和指导意义。     

成人院校非统计专业统计学教学改革的思考

成人高等教育作为我国高等教育的重要组成部分,其各门学科的教学改革除了应遵循高等教育改革的一般规律与要求外,还应有自身的特殊规律与要求。本文通过对其特殊性的理性分析,提出成人非统计专业统计学教学应加强统计观念教育、统计法律与道德教育,并加强统计基本理论与方法的教学与改革。     

Better Articulating Normal Curve Theory for Introductory Mathematical Statistics Students: Power Transformations and Their Back-Transformations

This article addresses a gap in many, if not all, introductory mathematical statistics textbooks, namely, transforming a random variable so that it better mimics a normal distribution. Virtually all such textbooks treat the subject of variable transformations, which furnishes a nice opportunity to introduce and study this transformation-to-normality topic, a topic students frequently encounter in subsequent applied statistics courses. Accordingly, this article reviews variable power transformations of the Box–Cox type within the context of normal curve theory, as well as addresses their corresponding back-transformations. It presents four theorems and a conjecture that furnish the basics needed to derive equivalent results for all nonnegative values of the Box–Cox power transformation exponent. Results are illustrated with the exponential random variable. This article also includes selected pedagogic tools created with R code.     

Analogies for Helping Clinicians and Investigators Better Understand the Principles and Practice of Biostatistics

For the interaction between the biostatistician and the clinician or research investigator to be successful, it is important not only for the investigator to be able to explain biological and medical principles in a way that can be understood by the biostatistician, so, too, the biostatistician needs tools to help the investigator understand both the practice of statistics and specific statistical methods. In our practice, we have found it useful to draw analogies between statistical concepts and familiar medical or everyday ideas. These analogies help to stress a point or provide an understanding on the part of the investigator. For example, explaining the reason for using a nonparametric procedure (a general procedure used when the underlying distribution of the data is not known or cannot be assumed) by comparing it to using broad spectrum antibiotics (a general antibiotic used when the specific bacteria causing infection is unknown or cannot be assumed) can be an effective teaching tool. We present a variety of useful (and hopefully amusing) analogies that can be adopted by statisticians to help investigators at all levels of experience better understand principles and practice of statistics.     

大数据时代的统计教育

2014年11月,美国统计学会适应大数据时代的要求,发布了统计学本科专业指导性教学纲要。而在2013年,我国统计类本科专业刚刚进行了一次较大调整,目前的专业课程设置和教学内容改革还处于探索阶段。美国统计学会发布的这份指导性教学纲要对于推进我国统计类本科专业教育改革具有重要借鉴意义。本文首先概括性地介绍了美国统计学会发布的统计学本科专业指导性教学纲要的核心内容,包括统计专业本科生应该掌握的基本技能和应该修读的主要课程,然后分析了我国统计类本科专业教育存在的问题,并提出了在大数据时代改进我国统计类本科专业教育的几点建议。     

A Survey of the Teaching of Statistics in M.B.A. Programs

A survey of business schools was conducted to obtain information about the current state of the teaching of business statistics to students enrolled in M.B.A. degree programs. The survey was undertaken for and presented at a June 1986 conference on “Making Statistics More Effective in Schools of Business,” held at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business. Information was elicited concerning both the required statistics sequence and elective statistics courses for M.B.A. students, as well as computer usage in these courses. This article summarizes the information obtained from the survey.     

A new generalized p-value approach for testing equality of coefficients of variation in k normal populations

A new generalized p-value method is proposed for testing the equality of coefficients of variation in k normal populations. Simulation studies show that the type I error probabilities are close to the nominal level. The proposed test is also compared with likelihood ratio test, modified Bennett's test and score test through Monte Carlo simulation, the results demonstrate that the generalized p-value method has satisfactory performance in terms of sizes and powers.     

Python for Unified Research in Econometrics and Statistics

Python is a powerful high-level open source programming language that is available for multiple platforms. It supports object-oriented programming and has recently become a serious alternative to low-level compiled languages such as C + +. It is easy to learn and use, and is recognized for very fast development times, which makes it suitable for rapid software prototyping as well as teaching purposes. We motivate the use of Python and its free extension modules for high performance stand-alone applications in econometrics and statistics, and as a tool for gluing different applications together. (It is in this sense that Python forms a “unified” environment for statistical research.) We give details on the core language features, which will enable a user to immediately begin work, and then provide practical examples of advanced uses of Python. Finally, we compare the run-time performance of extended Python against a number of commonly-used statistical packages and programming environments.

Supplemental materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Econometric Reviews to view the free supplemental file.     

Some Uses for Distribution-Fitting Software in Teaching Statistics

Statistics courses now make extensive use of menu-driven, interactive computer software. This article presents some insight as to how a new class of PC-based statistical software, called “distribution-fitting” software, can be used in teaching various courses in statistics.     

Two Statistics for Unconditional Exact Tests in Matched-Pairs Design

Abstract

In a recent article Hsueh et al. (Hsueh, H.-M., Liu, J.-P., Chen, J. J. (2001 Hsueh, H.-M., Liu, J.-P. and Chen, J. J. 2001. Unconditional exact tests for equivalence or noninferiority for paired binary endpoints. Biometrics, 57: 478–483. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Unconditional exact tests for equivalence or noninferiority for paired binary endpoints. Biometrics 57:478–483.) considered unconditional exact tests for paired binary endpoints. They suggested two statistics one of which is based on the restricted maximum-likelihood estimator. Properties of these statistics and the related tests are treated in this article.     

Statistics for a New Test of Discordance in Circular Data

This article considers the derivation of approximate distributions for two types of statistics that can be used in developing new tests of discordance in circular samples from the von Mises distribution. An alternative test of discordance is proposed based on the circular distance between sample points. The advantage of the test is that it allows users to detect possible outliers in both univariate and bivariate circular data. For illustration, the test is applied to two real circular data sets.     

Challenges and Opportunities for Statistics in the Next 25 Years

Beginning with the 75th Anniversary of the American Statistical Association in 1914 and for subsequent 25-year celebrations, distinguished members of the association have addressed the future of statistics. A four-person panel engaged in the same exercise during the 2014 Joint Statistical Meetings for the ASA's dodransbicentennial. The panel identified a variety of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for the profession in the next quarter of a century. This article highlights some of the discussion that took place.     

Phi-Divergence Statistics for Testing Linear Hypotheses in Logistic Regression Models

In this paper we introduce and study two new families of statistics for the problem of testing linear combinations of the parameters in logistic regression models. These families are based on the phi-divergence measures. One of them includes the classical likelihood ratio statistic and the other the classical Pearson's statistic for this problem. It is interesting to note that the vector of unknown parameters, in the two new families of phi-divergence statistics considered in this paper, is estimated using the minimum phi-divergence estimator instead of the maximum likelihood estimator. Minimum phi-divergence estimators are a natural extension of the maximum likelihood estimator.