A Bibliography on Audio-Visual Materials for Statistical Education

Abstract

In November 1973 the Statistical Education Section of the American Statistical Association established a committee on Modern Statistical Training Methods (MOSTRAM) consisting of four primary subcommittees. The author became chairman of the subcommittee on audio-visual materials and initiated the collection of items for a bibliography on this subject. Since this bibliography was to be restricted to materials useful for statistical education, and since the general audio-visual field was vast, the strategy employed was to request sources and information from many persons in statistics and to follow up all leads until a bibliographic item or a dead end was reached. In many cases, an entry was obtained only after a series of letters pursued suggestions from one person to the next. This approach, coupled with some patience, has produced the present listing. The present bibliography contains a significant number of items under the various category headings which should be useful for purposes of statistical education. The author, however, feels that there must be more material "out there someplace", at least under some of the categories such as wall charts, probability devices, and slides. It is hoped that the publication of the current list will stimulate readers to transmit to the author information on omissions so that a supplementary list can be prepared. Due to the nature of the task, the compilation of this bibliography became the responsibility of the committee chairman. The author, however, had at various stages counsel and advice from the other committee members (George Bateman, Roger Carlson, John Griffin, Dave Kleinbaum, Judah Rosenblatt, and Vasant Waikar), and their input is gratefully acknowledged. Also to be acknowledged is the contribution of a number of statisticians (and in some cases, nonstatisticians) who kindly answered requests for information and who provided answers or suggested appropriate persons to contact. In particular, Fred Leone repeatedly provided suggestions and contact names. The lack of literature specifically on statistical audio-visual materials made the gathering of the bibliography a slow and tedious process. There existed, however, one publication which provided additional sources and which might be of some use to the reader. This is the publication of The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Audiovisual Material in Mathematics, by Joseph A. Raab. It is dated 1971 and some of its content is old, but a revision is scheduled for publication in the latter part of 1975. The content of the present bibliography is selfexplanatory, except that all prices indicate the sale price unless followed by the word rental. The prices listed should be up-to-date as of about September 1975. Significant effort has been made to include only items which are currently available. In most cases doubtful items have been eliminated. This is a result of the author's discovery that the audio-visual field is unstable and that listings of such material usually include a large number of items which are no longer available, particularly if the list is not recent.