Dynamic, Interactive Documents for Teaching Statistical Practice

Deborah Nolan and Duncan Temple Lang

International Statistical Review, 2007, vol. 75, issue 3, 295-321

Abstract: Significant efforts have been made to overhaul the introductory statistics courses by placing greater emphasis on statistical thinking and literacy and less on rules, methods and procedures. We advocate broadening and increasing this effort to all levels of students and, importantly, using topical, interesting, substantive problems that come from the actual practice of statistics. We want students to understand the thought process of the “masters” in context, seeing their choices, different approaches and explorations. Similar to Open Source software, we think it is vital that the work of the community of researchers is accessible to the community of educators so that students can experience statistical applications and learn how to approach analyses themselves. We describe a mechanism by which one can collect all aspects or fragments of an analysis or simulation into a “document” so that the computations and results are reproducible, reusable and amenable to extensions. These documents contain various pieces of information (e.g. text, code, data, exploration paths) and can be processed to create regular descriptive papers in various formats (e.g. PDF, HTML), as well as acting as a database of the analysis which we can explore in rich new ways. Researchers, instructors and readers can control the various steps in the processing and rendering of the document. For example, this type of document supports interactive components with which a student can easily control and alter the inputs to the computations in a semi‐guided fashion, gradually delve deeper into the details, and go on to her own free‐form analysis. Our implementation for this system is based on widely used and standardized frameworks and readily supports multiple and different programming languages. Also, it is highly extensible which allows adaptation and future developments.

Date: 2007
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-5823.2007.00025.x

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:istatr:v:75:y:2007:i:3:p:295-321

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0306-7734

Access Statistics for this article

International Statistical Review is currently edited by Eugene Seneta and Kees Zeelenberg

More articles in International Statistical Review from International Statistical Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().