Statistics Education Research Group (Konold et al.)
Simulation software and classroom activities to help middle school students understand probability
Model Chance was a project funded by the National Science Foundation to develop simulation software and classroom activities to help middle school students learn about probability and data modeling. The simulation tool was integrated into our data-analysis software,
TinkerPlots and was eventually released as TinkerPlots version 2.0.
Cliff Konold is giving the September 18 talk for the UMass STEM Institute.
Developing tools and curricula for enhancing data analysis in the middle school
In the TinkerPlots project, funded by the National Science Foundation, we created a software tool and curriculum materials for teaching data analysis and statistics in middle schools.
Involving museum visitors in data analysis explorations
Funded by the National Science Foundation, the Tinkerzeum Planning Project was a one-year collaborative project exploring the feasibility of involving museum visitors in data analysis. These studies, which took place at the Museum of Science in Boston and at the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield MA, have helped us understand the kinds of data and exhibits that lead to compelling museum investigations and the types of additional supports visitors require to begin exploring data.
Ibrahim (Slash) successfully defended his dissertation in cognitive psychology and is now Dr. Dahlstrom-Hakki. Congratulations. He also graduated from SERG, and we wish him the best.
Presentation “Bringing Data and Chance Together in the Middle School” at the STEM Education Institute, Amherst, MA.
Poster session “To understand a distribution, try building it from scratch” at the NSF DR-K12 Principal Investigators Meeting, Arlington, VA.
Presentation “Understanding Distributions by Modeling Them” at Concord Consortium, Concord, MA.
Two students joined our group. Shailesh Hegde, a graduate student in Electrical & Computer Engineering, is the webmaster and technical assistant.
Cliff and Sibel presented research from our probability teaching experiment at SRTL-5, University of Warwick, London.
