Uwe Ziegenhagen

The multimedia project MM*STAT for teaching statistics

The multimedia project MM*STAT was developed to have an additional tool for teaching statistics. There are some important facts which influenced this development. First, teaching statistics for students in socio-economic sciences must include a broad spectrum of applications of statistical methods in these fields. A pure theoretical presentation is generally considered by the students to be tedious. Second, in practice no statistical analysis is carried out without a computer. Thus, teaching statistics must include the acquisition of computational capabilities. Third, statistics has become more and more complicated over time, because of increasingly complex data structures, statistical methods and models. Thus, an ever-increasing special knowledge of statistics is required and has to be taught. Fourth, notwithstanding these high demands on teaching statistics, the available lecture time, especially for the introductory courses, has remained constant over the years or has even been cut down.

e-Learning Statistics - A Selective Review

Modern computing equipment is present at schools and universities at all levels of education. In the statistical sciences computers offer great opportunities to enrich the learning process by the means of e.g. animations, software integration or on-the-fly computations. A personal review of different e-learning platforms for statistics is done in this paper. This review reveals facts that could be taken into account for future e-learning platforms in statistics. One of the most striking discoveries of our analysis is that students of statistics actually do not use electronic media in the desired frequency and actually rely more on print media such as books,copies of slides, etc.

Color Harmonization in Car Manufacturing Process

One of the major cost factors in car manufacturing is the painting of body and other parts such as wing or bonnet. Surprisingly, the painting may be even more expensive than the body itself. From this point of view it is clear that car manufacturers need to observe the painting process carefully to avoid any deviations from the desired result. Especially for metallic colors where the shining is based on microscopic aluminium particles, customers tend to be very sensitive towards a difference in the light reflection of different parts of the car. The following study, carried out in close cooperation with a partner from car industry, combines classical tests and nonparametric smoothing techniques to detect trends in the process of car painting. The localized versions motivated by t-test, Mann-Kendall, Cox-Stuart and a change point test are employed in this study. Suitable parameter settings and the properties of the proposed tests are studied by simulations based on resampling methods borrowed from nonparametric smoothing. The aim of the analysis is to find a reliable technical solution which avoids any interaction from a human side.

Yxilon: a client-server based statistical environment

Along with many others, we agree that a modern education in statistics needs to incorporate the practical analysis of real datasets, which are usually more complex than the common examples found in standard textbooks. The software used in the teaching of statistics includes standard spreadsheet environments such as OpenOffice and Excel and dedicated commercial and non-commercial packages such as R, Minitab or SPSS. With the freely available Yxilon environment we add another package and proliferate the statistical programming language XploRe, using a modern client/server based architecture. This architecture has the capabilities of serving statistical results in a variety of flavors for different groups of users. In this paper we describe the general setup of the Yxilon environment and present selected technical details.

On the Utility of E-Learning in Statistics

Abstract: Students of introductory courses consider statistics as particularly difficult, as the understanding of the underlying concepts may require more time and energy than for other disciplines. For decades statisticians have tried to enhance understanding with the help of technical solutions such as animation, video or interactive tools. However it is not clear if the added value generated by these e-learning tools justifies the work invested. In this paper the experience with various e-learning solutions in terms of utility and the impact on teaching is discussed.

e-Learning Statistics

! The objective for including the period of military service topic in the 2006 American Community Survey (ACS) Content Test was to improve the quality of the data for this topic from the ACS. ! This objective stemmed from four sources: (1) the Census 2000 Content Reinterview Survey (CRS) showed moderate levels of inconsistency in the data for several period of service categories; (2) anecdotal evidence suggests that respondents tend to omit reporting service in periods in which they only served briefly; (3) the existing question is highly demanding of the respondents concentration and patience; and (4) the existing question has more categories than are currently needed by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the chief stakeholder for the item. Methodology ! The Content Test used the existing question as the control question. The test question is a modified version of the existing question (see boxes below). A notable difference between the test and the control questions is their opposite placement of the parenthetical material for the categories for the Vietnam era, Korean War, and World War II (for example, the control reads: Vietnam era ! The item was included in the Content Test Follow-up Survey to measure response variability (not response bias). vi Research Questions and Results The research questions and the results drawn from an analysis of the results are listed below (also see information pages in Appendix A). ! Research Question 1: Do the changes to the period of military service question affect the distribution of responses for periods of service? Result: There were statistically significant differences between the control and test questions for two of the test response ! Research Question 2: Do the changes to the period of military service question adversely affect the item nonresponse rate? Result: There were no significant differences between the control and test nonresponse rates. ! Research Question 3: Do the changes to the period of military service question improve the consistency of reporting for the item (that is, do the changes reduce the response variability)? Result: There were no significant differences between the control and test questions in the measurements of the simple response variance. ! Research Question 4: Do the changes to the period of military service question increase the proportion of veterans reporting multiple periods of service? Result: There was no statistically significant difference between the questions in the incidence of reporting of multiple periods of …

Integrable e-lements for statistics education

Without doubt modern education in statistics must involve practical, computer-based data analysis but the question arises whether and how computational elements should be integrated into the canon of methodological education. Should the student see and study high-level programming code right at the beginning of his or her studies? Which technology can be presented during class and which computational elements can re-occur (at increasing level of complexity) during the different courses? In this paper we address these questions and discuss where e-techniques have their limits in statistics education.