The influence of the constructivist perspective on the teaching of statistics and the importance of teaching with data

Abstract

In 1985, the North American Group of the Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education affirmed the notion that the constructivist perspective would provide guidelines for instructors to facilitate student learning. The constructivist view of the student as an active learner as well as the present day emphases on the automation of the calculations and the student learning of the concepts has motivated the use of multimedia in the online teaching of statistics. Here, I examined the influence of the constructivist perspective on the teaching of statistics, the influence of the constructivist perspective on the use of computer assisted calculations and on the use of automated simulations and the significance of teaching with data. Based on this examination, one may improve upon the teaching of statistics (1) by accounting for the omission of elements of sound and video that were observed for past online courses, (2) by providing instruction on how data is produced for an empirical study, (3) by providing small data sets to show the influence upon the statistic of outliers, skew and variance heterogeneity through the use of manual calculations, (4) by providing large real datasets so that students may draw substantive conclusions about the statistics, and (5) by using automated simulations to convey the statistical properties of the sampling distribution of the statistic.