Statistics Textbooks: Pedagogical Tools or Impediments to Learning?

Schacht, Steven P.

doi:10.2307/1317743

Cited by 12 publications

(12 citation statements)

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“…Regarding the former, in the past few years we have witnessed the publication of texts called Statistics for the Terrified (Kranzler and Moursund 1999), Statistics for People Who (Think They) Hate Statistics (Salkind 2000), and Statistics Without Tears (Rowntree 2004). 1,2 And during the 20 years since Blalock (1987) first insisted that reducing students' statistics anxiety should be an explicit course goal, a number of articles have appeared in Teaching Sociology that have described techniques for doing so (e.g., Auster 2000;Paxton 2006;Potter 1995;Schacht 1990;Schacht andStewart 1990, 1992;Schumm et al 2002). Bessant's (1992:143) description of students' anxiety as "one of the most significant barriers that instructors encounter while teaching statistics" nicely summarizes sociologists' recent perspective on the issue.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“Statistics Anxiety” Among Sociology Majors

DeCesare

2007

Teach Sociol

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confidence: 99%

“Statistics Anxiety” Among Sociology Majors

DeCesare

2007

Teach Sociol

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“…As described in the findings earlier, t tests and chi-square tests remain prominent stalwarts, if only in the preliminary stages of an article’s findings. In his review of statistics textbooks, Schacht (1990) found that most books cover one-sample, independent-sample, and paired-sample types of t tests. Perhaps teaching one type in depth and then merely mentioning the other two would suffice, freeing up a few days of lecture to cover other topics.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Schacht took a different approach, studying 12 statistics textbooks. He was struck that “[a]lthough some texts treat various topics more extensively than others, there does appear to be fairly widespread agreement on the topics that should be covered in introductory statistics textbooks” (Schacht 1990:392). We unfortunately cannot glean from his findings the extent to which particular topics are covered.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Measures of Association to Multilevel Models: Sociology Journals and the Quantitative Literacy Gap

Linneman

2020

Teach Sociol

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While most sociology majors must take a statistics course, the content of this course varies widely across departments. Starting from the assumption that sociology students should be able to engage effectively with the sociological literature, this article examines the statistical techniques used in 2,804 journal articles—from four generalist sociology journals from 1990 to 2019 and 11 additional sociology journals from 2019—in order to assess which techniques have risen or fallen in prevalence. Although stalwarts such as ordinary least squares regression, chi-square tests, and t tests maintain strong presences, the rise of logistic regression, interaction effects, and multilevel models has been dramatic. After assessing the proportion of articles students hypothetically could understand given various levels of statistical training, the article ends with suggestions for how to revamp the statistics course to help our students become more numerate citizens, both in their sociology courses and in the world at large.

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“…La investigación sobre libros de texto de matemáticas es amplia, siendo menor en estadística, donde encontramos ejemplos como los de Brewer (1985), Schacht (1990) …”

Section: Investigaciones Sobre Libros De Texto De Matemáticasunclassified

Los recursos tecnológicos en la estadística bidimensional en los textos españoles de bachillerato

Gea¹,

Batanero²,

López‐Martín³

et al. 2015

TED

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Los recursos tecnológicos en la estadística bidimensional en los textos españoles de bachillerato Technological Resources in Bidimensional Statistics in High School Textbooks Os recursos tecnológicos na estadística bidimensional nos textos espanhóis do Ensino MédioResumen Los currículos actuales recomiendan el uso de los recursos tecnológicos en la enseñanza de la estadística, por la ventaja que suponen en el cálculo y representación gráfica, el trabajo con datos reales y el aprendizaje de conceptos a través de la simulación. En esta investigación se analizan los recursos tecnológicos que los libros de texto sugieren para la enseñanza y aprendizaje de la estadística bidimensional en bachillerato (organización y representación de datos bidimensionales, correlación y regresión). La importancia de este aspecto se debe a que extiende la dependencia funcional a situaciones aleatorias y proporciona al alumno oportunidades de modelizar numerosas aplicaciones. Por otro lado, la investigación didáctica muestra dificultades de comprensión y concepciones erróneas en esta área. Mediante un análisis de contenido se han estudiado dieciséis libros de texto españoles, ocho libros de cada una de las dos especialidades de bachillerato que incluyen "Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales" y "Ciencia y Tecnología". En dichos libros se estudia el uso que se hace de recursos tecnológicos en los problemas y procedimientos propuestos, los tipos de recursos que se referencian para trabajar con internet y el contenido de un CD que acompaña a la mayoría de estos textos. Los resultados muestran una escasa presencia de recursos tecnológicos en los textos analizados, a la vez que una gran variabilidad de los recursos descritos. La referencia a recursos en internet se suele restringir a unidades didácticas y no a conjuntos de datos que puedan usarse en proyectos o a simuladores que faciliten la comprensión conceptual. El CD que acompaña a los textos a veces reproduce el mismo texto o se reduce a colecciones de ejercicios tradicionales; son minoría los problemas y procedimientos que usan recursos tecnológicos. Se concluye con algunas recomendaciones para la mejora de estos textos, teniendo en cuenta dichos recursos. Palabras clave:Estadística bidimensional, libros de texto, bachillerato, recursos tecnológicos. TED AbstractCurrent curriculums recommend the use of technological resources in the teaching of statistics, due to the help they represent in the calculation and production of graphs, the work with real data and the learning of several concepts through simulation. In this research, we analyse the different technological resources suggested in high school textbooks for teaching and learning bi-dimensional statistics in high school (organization and representation of bi-dimensional data, correlation and regression).The importance of this issue is due to the fact that it extends functional dependence to random situations and provides students with opportunities to model numerous applications. On the other hand, previous research shows many diffic...

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Statistics Textbooks: Pedagogical Tools or Impediments to Learning?

Cited by 12 publications

References 13 publications

“Statistics Anxiety” Among Sociology Majors

“Statistics Anxiety” Among Sociology Majors

From Measures of Association to Multilevel Models: Sociology Journals and the Quantitative Literacy Gap

Los recursos tecnológicos en la estadística bidimensional en los textos españoles de bachillerato

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