Reconsidering Statistics Education: A National Science Foundation Conference

1 Recent survey data demonstrate an acute need for curricular resources in statistics. The first half of this paper summarizes and compares a dozen current or recent NSF projects, most of which are developing such resources. (As an aid to interested instructors, an appendix gives more detail on the individual projects, along with a list of available files that provide even more detail.) Nearly all these projects involve activities for statistical laboratories, at least implicitly, although the labs are used in a variety of ways: for analysis of archival data sets, for hands-on production of data for analysis, and for simulation-based learning. These three kinds of labs are compared in terms of their complementary sets of advantages.2 This paper grows out of a small conference which brought together NSF Program Officers, Principal Investigators and Co-PIs of the projects, and a half-dozen other teachers of statistics. The second half of the paper develops four themes from the conference: (1) Questioning st...