Course Overview, Lesson by Lesson

Because there are roughly as many lessons in ActivStats as there are lectures in a typical one semester course, a discussion of the lessons is, in effect, an annotated syllabus. This is, however, written for the teacher rather than the student.

1. Introduction

ActivStats has many features. This chapter introduces them and offers examples. We recommend that students start by working through the activities here. There are a number of Preference options that students may wish to select. One in particular adjusts the lesson order to match the two most common subject orders in statistics texts. The first Homework is useful at two levels; we will analyze data derived from the class's responses later. Students whose first language is not English may be particularly interested in the option to display the text of expositions. When this option is selected, activities start by displaying a window with the text of the narrator's script. Reading this first can make it easier to follow the spoken narration.

Teachers' Notes: Assign Lessons 1 and 2 as the initial assignment at the first class meeting. This establishes the pattern of students viewing material first in ActivStats before it is discussed in class. If you have a computer projector, it is a good idea to show ActivStats to students so they know what to expect when they start up. Remind students that the ActivStats DVD must be in the computer's drive for ActivStats to run.

This is also the time to get students started with their statistics software. If they will be using Data Desk, have the students click on the Data Desk icon in the toolbar to launch Data Desk. The Data Desk documentation can be found in the ActivStats Help menu. The first two chapters are particularly helpful in getting started (numbered chapters 2 and 4 for consistency with the printed Data Desk documentation.)

At this point in the course, it is just beginning to occur to students that this course is different from any they have had before. They need to figure out where the computer work fits in, and to establish appropriate work habits for taking notes from computer-based materials. It is vital that students not put off learning to work with the computer, and equally important that they not believe that everything they need to know can be found on the DVD. One method is to have students hand in answers to the study questions that appear in most activities. Another is to give several short quizzes during the early part of a course that can be easily answered by anyone who has done the computer work. One easy way to do that is to repeat material from one of the ActivStats self-test quizzes or from study questions in an exposition.