Abstract
Students studying psychology or a social science have to take courses in statistics, but students often experience difficulties in learning statistical concepts and techniques. Indeed, there is a body of interdisciplinary research that indicates that students tend to have confusions and difficulties with a variety of topics in statistics (Garfield and Ahlgren, 1988; Shaughnessy, 1992). It has been found that students hold misconceptions relating to fundamental statistical concepts, such as the mean and correlation (Mevarech, 1983; Morris, 1997). Research in computer-based learning has looked at how the computer can be used effectively to address students' statistical misconceptions and help students come to understand key statistical ideas (Cumming and Thomason, 1995; Morris, 1998).DOI:10.1080/0968776000080109
Highlights
Students studying psychology or a social science have to take courses in statistics, but students often experience difficulties in learning statistical concepts and techniques
Students can adjust the correlation coefficient by moving the slider to the left or right and can observe the effect that this has on the scatter plot
The findings suggest that the above activity was valuable to students because it showed how the correlation coefficient represents data displayed on a scatter plot
Summary
Students studying psychology or a social science have to take courses in statistics, but students often experience difficulties in learning statistical concepts and techniques. It has been found that students hold misconceptions relating to fundamental statistical concepts, such as the mean and correlation (Mevarech, 1983; Morris, 1997). Research in computer-based learning has looked at how the computer can be used effectively to address students' statistical misconceptions and help students come to understand key statistical ideas (Cumming and Thomason, 1995; Morris, 1998). In the case of statistics, computer technology can be used to offer multiple representations of statistical concepts that are computationally linked so that changes in one representation respond to changes in another. Computer-based learning materials can be designed so that when a learner changes the available data set, or the value of a statistic, such as a correlation coefficient, they will see the corresponding change in the data displayed on a scatter plot
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