Friday, September 28, 2012

Reflections on Stats week 3

Week 3's class went much better than week 2. The students were better able to do the class work, they had questions for me to answer during the short lecture time and they were working on the first unit exam. I offered to make Camtasia videos on how to use the TI83 calculator and Excel to do statistics. there were some requests, that I finished today. I assume there will be more. I also put in a forum where students could ask HW help. So far only 1 question was posted. One of my students asked if she should drop the class, she should have registered for MAT077 not MAT177. She sent me an email commenting that the class was too difficult, it went too fast, and there is too much work. She then sent a follow up email 12 hours later asking if I respond to emails; told her, she would have to figure out for herself whether or not to withdraw form the class.

Friday, September 21, 2012

Statistics MAT177 Week 2

So last Saturday didn't go quite as I had envisioned. The first group lab was successful in teaching students about frequency tables but the second one took much too long and students left confused about stratified sampling. so next year I will leave that question out and just try to explain it. So because the second part took much longer than I had predicted, most groups didn't get to work on their exams. A few set up plans of attack and were going to bring the work into this week's class to discuss. So we will see how it goes. Tomorrow we are discussing Central Tendency, quartiles and standard deviation. I will show them how to use Excel & the TI-83 to calculate these values. They will also determine which HW problem I will grade from chapter 1, I will use a random number generator to determine which problem based on the number of tries chosen by a group. Those are my plans and I am bound to change them in the morning. Sanford

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Statistics class day 1

Well my first class went almost perfect I forgot to show students how to submit homework and post to the discussion board, but otherwise the orientation part went well. I broke students into groups and had them decide which distribution graph (uniform normal, left & right skewed) represented a given data set. they failed miserably. I then had the students take a previous knowledge assessment. The grades ranged fro 20 to 56 (out of 100), there is nowhere to go but up!!! My plan for Saturday is to answer the student questions about cumulative frequency; do the chapter 1 labs in the book. then have students start thinking about test questions.