Abstract
Misconceptions in statistics among students of non-statistics major are quite common. This paper will present the humble efforts of the author in trying to reduce misconceptions among her statistics students using technology. The examples were drawn from the teaching and learning of statistics to Master of Technical and Vocational Education students in the Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia. EXCEL spreadsheet, power point presentation slides and a concept-mapping tool were integrated into classroom instructions on descriptive statistics. Increased class-room interactions were observed through out the learning process and a decrease in the percentage of students committing the specific misconceptions were recorded.
Highlights
Statistics is an important tool in research and in everyday usage
The results of the analysis showed that there is a statistically significant difference between the mean rating on the questionnaire and that of the criterion, p=.00 and t =16.14, df = 37 with the mean rating by students higher than the criterion
Technology is not the answer to every problem that we face in our endeavours to help students learn statistics
Summary
Statistics is an important tool in research and in everyday usage. Statistics knowledge is relevant to those who intent to become statisticians and to others such as teachers, engineers and businessperson. Statistics misconceptions have been observed among university students on various topics including associations and correlations (Morris 1998; Estapa and Sanches Cobo, 2001), hypothesis testing (Lecoutre and Lecoutre 2001 in Batanero 2004) and probability (Keeler and Steinhorst, 2001). Topics in the descriptive statistics include scales of measurements, data summarization and presentation, associations and correlations between variables. Most students have come across descriptive statistics before except for the topic of association and correlation between variables where students are new to it. Teachers often overestimate students’ ability to understand the various concepts under this topic While teaching this topic to her education students the author frequently observes the following mistakes being made such as,. The author would like to share some of the efforts made to eradicate these misconceptions using readily available technology and applications namely, the computer, EXCEL spreadsheet, power-point presentation slides and concept-mapping tool
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