Read This First!

On the
Side

Read This First!

While browsing this website, keep an eye on this column. It will contain links to:

activities
worksheets
assessment
other web sites
articles
further resources

And occasionally you may come across a statistics joke!

Mark Twain (or Disraeli, no one really knows) once said, 'There are lies, damned lies and statistics.'

Or as someone paraphrased, 'There are lies, out-and-out lies, and outliers!'

About the Raybould Tutorial Fellowship

Don't forget - Data is plural!

Icons

Icons used in this site are links to other pages or resources. The most common are:

Word document

web page

This website is an outcome of the 1997 Raybould Tutorial Fellowship. Each year the Raybould Fellow spends the second semester on a project to support senior secondary mathematics in Queensland. For my project I have chosen to provide curriculum support for the topic of Exploring Data and have chosen a website rather than a booklet as my mode of publication.

Resources

This website contains activities, worksheets, overhead transparency masters, datasets and assessment to support data exploration. It also contains an extensive collection of articles designed to enhance the statistics knowledge of the teacher. There is a resources page that gives a select list of the finest resources available to support introductory statistics, including texts, websites, datasets, java applets and mailing lists.

To make the resources accessible to a wide range of people, the majority of the resources are available as web pages and as Word 2.0 documents. A web page can be accessed by pointing to the image while the image leads to a Word 2.0 document.

FYI

Many secondary mathematics teachers in Queensland completed their formal study of statistics years ago, or have never studied statistics. Their knowledge of modern statistics may not extend much beyond what is in the high school textbooks and thus they may feel uncomfortable when a more inquisitive student wants to know more about a topic than what is in the text.

To assist these teachers, many pages of this website include a section headed FYI (For Your Information) that contains articles that discuss topics beyond those listed in the syllabuses. Many of the articles originated from discussions between the knowledgeable statistics educators who populate two Internet mailing lists devoted to statistics education.

Datasets

Datasets will be available in three formats:

Tab delimited
This is a format that any spreadsheet or statistics program should be able to read. This format is also suitable for uploading datasets to the TI graphics calculators.

Excel 4.0
Excel is widely used in Queensland high schools.

NCSS Jr. 6.0
NCSS is a professional statistics program written by Jerry Hinze. NCSS Jr. 6.0 is a 'light' version of the full NCSS 6.0 program. It provides excellent software support for all of the statistics in Mathematics A, B and C. It has an Excel-like interface, is easy to use and is absolutely free! Click here and follow the link to the downloads page to download it now.

Navigating the Website

At the bottom of each page is the navigation section which allows you to move around the website easily. The topics are arranged in the order in which they are commonly taught in an introductory statistics course.

While the website is primarily a resource for data exploration, there are limited resources available for other statistics topics that are taught in Mathematics A, B and C. Their pages are listed at the bottom of the navigation section.

Searching the Website

You can search this website for key words using a simple search engine. Look for SEARCH in the navigation section at the bottom of most pages.

Visitor's Book

We are interested in knowing who our visitors are, where they are from and about their involvement in statistics education. Please take the time to sign the Visitor's Book before you depart. Thank you!

Your Web Browser

This website is best viewed with Netscape 3.0 , Internet Explorer 3.0 or later versions of these, with Java enabled. If you are using an earlier version of browser software that doesn't support coloured cells in tables, well, you may miss out on the jokes!

Copyright

Most of the resources on this site are the property of Education Queensland. You are welcome to use the resources on this site freely for educational purposes if you acknowledge Education Queensland as the owner of the resource. You are not permitted to sell these materials for commercial gain without the express written consent of Education Queensland.

If the resource you wish to use contains an acknowledgement (e.g. a dataset from another source), then you should acknowledge that source also.

Exceptions to this are material that is owned by another person or organisation and for which permission has been granted for use on this site. If you wish to use these resources you must seek permission of the owner of the copyright.