Newest >>Australian sites >> DASL and Chance >> DISCUSS project >> Census >> Fun >> Surveys and Questionnaires >> A Good Read
You have arrived at Sidney Tyrrell's web pages which are part of the National
Grid for Learning 
and were last updated on 4 January 2005.
Please keep me posted if you find any broken links,
or have any comments or suggestions. The aim of these pages is to provide an
informal guide to a wide variety of resources which I have personally visited
and investigated.
I am working on making these pages more accessible for those with dyslexia or visual difficulties, and at the same time generally reorganising the material. If you are having trouble reading this you can change the background colour and font preferences (colour and size) for this site. You might like to give it a whirl - just for fun! Alternatively you could change the GENERAL PREFERENCES in your browser.
The resources include a guide to the rich but confusing National Statistics site, places to find data, teaching resource sites which contain valuable data for examples or are just pure fun with a purpose, pages relating to surveys and questionnaires, some good reads of journals and on-line statistics books, and mathematics sites including a link to Coventry University's Mathematics Support Centre which contains downloadable worksheets, on line tests and some animated resources for a variety of topics, and of course Douglas Butler's Oundle site which is frequently my first stop for many things. Finally under the Excel section are downloadable spreadsheets showing you 'how', including those produced for a variety of mathematics conferences.
The National Statistics site has a special section stats4schools , which provides lesson ideas, large datasets for exploration and Iinks to other useful sites including DISCUSS. A different ongoing project is that of STARS:the creation of STAtistical resources from Real dataSets. Resources are accessible electronically for use by both staff and students, and they all reflect real scenarios. It is hoped they will address a number of issues, including professional development for lecturers, and student motivation and retention.
My favourite teaching site, is the wonderful Australian Exploring Data site, which is a gold mine of well laid out information and data sets for basic stats courses compiled by Rex Bogg. Unfortunately it can take for ever to load. Another good Australian data site is OzDaSL with examples and data sets listed by topic, with downloadable data. An example is the activity of Dolphin groups to illustrate the use of Contingency tables, or the tale of a bar of soap illustrating regression.
Now on a new website which provides speedier access, Chance and Data in the news, based in Tasmania, provides data from newspaper articles with questions. Topics covered include data collection and sampling, data representation, chance and basic probability, data reduction, and inference.
DASL is the well known Data and Story Library. (I occasionally have difficulty downloading straight into Excel from here so save the data as a text file first, and then open it in Excel.)
The justly famous Chance Database is a database designed to help teach an introductory probability or statistics course. Check out Chance News regularly and visit the database for various data sets, e.g. the distribution of birthdays in the US for 1978 which is a surprisingly periodic time series - babies arrive Mondays to Fridays. Also there is the Gender Related Development Index compiled by the United Nations based on life expectancy, literacy, and standard of living. Videos of the Chance Lectures are another goody on offer at the site. Of particular help to teachers is the list of Articles and Books, with links, with a further list subdivided by topic.
A project with which I am involved with Neville Hunt is DISCUSS : Discovering Important Statistical Concepts Using SpreadSheets. It is a modified and supplemented web-based implementation of the widely used DISCUS materials for teaching elementary Statistics, and it's FREE. It aims to integrate the powerful interactive capabilities of Microsoft Excel with the convenience of web-based resource materials using Microsoft Internet Explorer. Now for the bad news. We are currently moving the site, bit by bit, to a more reliable server so please bear with us if you find a link down.
The RSS Centre for Statistical Education now has some brilliant case studies in medicine for A level students with downloadable data, and are also associated with the CensusAtSchool project. This is now International and has data from 3 continents available on line, plus worksheets, and is a good source of ideas for analysis.
From the UK, where almost 60,000 pupils took part, there are some large samples of data from pupils who come from rural areas, urban areas, small towns and suburbs. On the international scene the project now links with similar censuses in Queensland, Australia, South Africa, and Norway (you need to be good at Norwegian!). Phase Two is underway and has questions designed to link all the international versions of CensusAtSchool.
Also of interest is BOAST, an online forum provided by the Royal Statistical Society for teachers in its Associated Schools and Colleges. (Membership of this scheme is open to all schools and colleges in the United Kingdom providing education in the 5-19 age range. For further details email Valerie Evans.
The Collection of Historical and Contemporary Census Data project website, CHCC for short, has teaching and learning materials for piloting using data from UK censuses prior to 2001 . Follow the links from the home page. Some of it needs improving but they would be grateful for feedback.
And now for some fun: do visit an interesting small probability site called Computer Animated Statistics, which includes a wonderful demo of the Monty Hall Paradox (do I switch my choice or not?). Don't miss the Probability by Surprise site which includes a natty illustration of the Birthdays problem.
To find out about famous bits of mathematics, or to view an animated version of C.J.Minard's diagram of Napoleon's Russian campaign visit the site at York run by Peter Lee. A useful reference source, when you want to know a bit more about Student or other famous mathematicians is the History Archive at St Andrews. On line questions in a variety of statistical topics, with solutions, are available at Simon Fraser University.
There's too much for one page so I have placed information about surveys and questionnaires separately, and on another page I have identified some good reads of journals, on-line statistics books and some useful statistics lists.
