Teaching Statistics A Bag of Tricks

All students in the sciences, economics, psychology, social sciences andmedicine take an introductory statistics course. However, statistics can benotoriously difficult to teach as it is seen by many students as difficult andboring, if not irrelevant to their subject of choice. To help dispel thesemisconceptions, Gelman and Nolan have put together this fascinating andthought-provoking book. Based on years of teaching experience the book providesa wealth of demonstrations, examples and projects that involve active studentparticipation.Part I of the book presents a large selection of activities for introductorystatistics courses and combines chapters such as, 'First week of class', withexercises to break the ice and get students talking; then 'Descriptivestatistics' , collecting and displaying data; then follows the traditionaltopics - linear regression, data collection, probability and inference. Part IIgives tips on what does and what doesn't work in class: how to set up effectivedemonstrations and examples, how to encourage students to participate in classand work effectively in group projects. A sample course plan is provided. PartIII presents material for more advanced courses on topics such as decisiontheory, Bayesian statistics and sampling.

Andrew Gelman is a Professor in the Department of Statistics, Columbia University, New York.