We followed established best practices in concept inventory design and developed a 12-item inventory to assess student ability in statistical reasoning in biology (Statistical Reasoning in Biology Concept Inventory [SRBCI]). It is important to assess student thinking in this conceptual area, because it is a fundamental requirement of being…

Graduates with well-developed capabilities in finance are invaluable to our society and in increasing demand. Universities face the challenge of designing finance programmes to develop these capabilities and the essential knowledge that underpins them. Our research responds to this challenge by identifying threshold concepts that are central to…

We surveyed researchers in the health and exercise sciences to explore different areas and magnitudes of bias in researchers' decision making. Participants were presented with scenarios (testing a central hypothesis with p = 0.06 or p = 0.04) in a random order and surveyed about what they would do in each scenario. Participants showed significant…

Students' informal inferential reasoning (IIR) is often inconsistent with the normative logic underlying formal statistical methods such as Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), even after instruction. In two experiments reported here, student's IIR was assessed using an intuitive ANOVA task at the beginning and end of a statistics course. In both…

The arithmetic mean is a fundamental statistical concept. Unfortunately, social science students rarely develop an intuitive understanding of the mean and rely on the formula to describe or define it. According to constructivist pedagogy, educators that have access to a variety of conceptualizations of a particular concept are better equipped to…

The purpose of this paper is to report the results of a quantitative analysis exploring the interaction and relationship between the online database and electronic journal collections at the J. N. Desmarais Library of Laurentian University. A very strong relationship exists between the number of searches and the size of the online database…

In a survey of all PhD programs in psychology in the United States and Canada, the authors documented the quantitative methodology curriculum (statistics, measurement, and research design) to examine the extent to which innovations in quantitative methodology have diffused into the training of PhDs in psychology. In all, 201 psychology PhD…

This paper describes the findings of an OECD project examining ICT impact measurement and analyses based on official statistics. Both economic and social impacts are covered and some results are presented. It attempts to place ICT impacts measurement into an Information Society conceptual framework, provides some suggestions for standardising…

Details theoretical and practical uses for Statistics Canada's E-STAT CD-ROM in helping preservice teachers explore the local communities in which they are to teach. Claims that E-STAT allows users to learn mapping and graphing skills and to confront their preconceptions about particular locales. Notes possible uses in social studies instruction.…

This report describes a project originally intended to identify demographic patterns among adults with low literacy skills in each Canadian province. The project was carried out between March 2000 and June 2001 under the auspices of Movement for Canadian Literacy (MCL). The project was based on the assumption that demographic information about…