ICOTS8: Scientific Programme: Paper 5D1

This paper is from Session 5D: The use of innovative technologies to enhance assessment of statistical knowledge

Full topic list

which comes under Topic 5: Assessment in statistics education

(Friday 16th, 11:00-12:30)

Statistics assessment: the good, the bad, and the ugly

Presenter

James Nicholson (University of Durham, United Kingdom)

Co-authors

Sean McCusker (University of Durham, United Kingdom)
Jim Ridgway (University of Durham, United Kingdom)

Abstract

Assessment tasks and scoring schemes convey information to students and teachers about the nature of each discipline, and what is valued. It is important that tasks provoke desirable classroom practices, and motivate students to continue to engage with the discipline. Tasks from high-stakes national examinations are presented that are likely to have the opposite effect; Most are ‘toy’ problems where a technical exercise is presented in a context which is uninteresting and oversimplified. In contrast, we show tasks that engage students in reasoning with authentic data from large scale surveys, and that require statistical reasoning to challenge assertions about matters of fact or plausible courses of action. We believe that better tasks are an important element in addressing Hand’s (2009) concerns about the public image of statistics.