Teaching Statistics in a Community College – Connections

Friday, May 20, 2005, 10:30 – 11:50 a.m.  USCOTS Conference

Presenters: 

Mary Parker, Austin Community College, mparker@austincc.edu

Brian Smith, McGill University, brian.smith@mcgill.ca

http://www.austincc.edu/mparker/uscots/

 

Resources available today:

On the web:

CAUSE:  http://www.causeweb.org/  

COMAP:  http://www.comap.org   (Membership required for full access.  $41/year)

NSF’s National Digital Library:  http://nsdl.org/

NASA-AMATYC-NSF Projects:  http://web.management.mcgill.ca/smithb/#USCOTS

Statistics Textbooks:  Each of these books includes many standard topics.  The comments here indicate which less-standard topics are also included.

DeVeaux and Velleman:  Introductory Statistics. Pearson, 2004.  Emphasis on graphing.

Freedman, Pisani, Purves, Adhikari.  Statistics. 2nd ed. W. W. Norton, 1991.  Includes extensive interesting details about sampling. 

Moore, David:  Basic Practice of Statistics. 3rd ed. W. H. Freeman, 2004.  Includes discussion of residuals, influential points, and Simpson’s paradox. 

Rossman and Chance:  Workshop Statistics: Discovery with Data.2nd ed. Key College Publishing. 2001.  Includes many activities.

Tashman and Lamborn, The Ways and Means of Statistics.  Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1979.  A 1980’s book which is quite elementary, yet includes a brief introduction to multiple regression. 

Utts and Heckard.  Mind on Statistics.  Duxbury, 2002.  Good early discussion of how to critique statistics articles in the newspaper. Includes Simpson’s Paradox.

Other textbooks:

COMAP, For All Practical Purposes:  Mathematical Literacy in Today’s World. 6th ed. W. H. Freeman, 2003.  Includes sampling, the Central Limit Theorem, and confidence intervals.

COMAP, College Algebra:  Modeling our World. Prelim. Ed. W. H. Freeman, 2002.  This is the only College Algebra book I have seen that introduces residual plots as part of determining whether data is linear enough to use regression.

Bittinger, et. al.  College Algebra.  Addison Wesley, 1997. Includes regression with brief mention of correlation.

Sullivan and Sullivan.  College Algebra Pearson, 2004.  Includes regression with brief mention of correlation.

Other books:

Hand, et. al.  A Handbook of Small Data Sets. Chapman and Hall, 1994   A useful resource for data. 

Sharpe, Ali, and Potter.  A  Casebook for Business Statistics.  Wiley, 2001. Cases with analysis questions and discussion questions.

Tanur, et. al.  Statistics:  A Guide to the Unknown. 2nd ed. Holden-Day, 1978.  3rd ed. Wadsworth, 1989   Journal articles using statistics with problems/questions at the end of each article suitable for elementary statistics students.

Last updated May 18, 2005