WISE Stuff

A key motivation for developing the WISE site is to take advantage of the incredible resources freely available on the Internet and the special interactive capability that these resources provide. Dynamic applets allow students to try their own ‘What if…’ scenarios. Yet to be most effective, students need guidance and access to help.

WISE Stuff is a collection of resources we developed that don’t fit tidily elsewhere. We will continue to add these resources to the WISE site and we \ welcome your suggestions.

Last updated: October 5, 2011

Using WISE Tutorials

Each WISE tutorial includes suggestions for how that tutorial may be used for instruction. The tutorials are modular to provide flexibility. These tutorials cover introductory statistics concepts such as hypothesis testing, sampling distributions, and statistical power. Most tutorials feature an interactive applet that allows students to simulate statistical techniques such as sampling in order to see how different parameters affect relevant statistics.

The tutorials can be used as laboratory exercises with faculty supervision or they can be assigned as independent homework. Some tutorials have worksheets and follow-up questions that students can turn in for faculty evaluation.

The tutorials are designed to supplement traditional teaching materials, addressing specific topics that are difficult to present with traditional classroom technologies. The tutorials promote self-paced learning and to provide a means for advanced students to review concepts.

Instructors’ Notes explain how to best use the tutorials in class settings:

Using WISE Applets

The WISE applets can be used for classroom demonstrations separately from the tutorials,

For demonstrations, you may choose to enlarge displays of applets by decreasing screen resolution. Changing your screen resolution may re-arrange items on your desktop.

Tips for Using Applets for Demonstrations:

Excel Downloads

Statistical Distributions

StatWISE – distributions plus
You can download this Excel workbook to have easy access to basic statistics distributions on your computer. The workbook includes Z, t, F, chi-square, and binomial distributions as well as selected computations such as estimating the median for grouped data.

Demonstrations Using Excel

Short Teaching Papers on Selected Topics

Quick Guides

Downloading Data from ICPSR

The WISE Quick Guide to Downloading Data from ICPSR provides step-by-step guidance for downloading data in SPSS format from the very extensive collection maintained by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR).

Enlarge Applet Displays for Demos

To enlarge displays of applets for presentations or demonstrations, you may magnify or decrease screen resolution. Changing your resolution, however, may re-arrange items on your desktop.

SPSS Macro Guide

Here you can find a Quick Guide to SPSS Macros for a short tutorial describing what an SPSS macro is, what it can do for you, and how to use one in SPSS.

Using G*Power

G*Power 3 is free software for power analysis. Our quick guide gives an overview and examples of how to use the program, as well as a link to download it.

Selected WISE Publications

Aberson, C. L., Berger, D. E., Emerson, E. P., & Romero, V. (1997) WISE: A web interface for statistics education. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 29, 217-221.

Aberson, C. L., Berger, D. E., Healy, M . R., Kyle, D., & Romero, V. L. (2000). Evaluation of an interactive tutorial for teaching the Central Limit Theorem. Teaching of Psychology, 27, 289-291.

Aberson, C. L., Berger, D. E., Healy, M. R., & Romero, V. (2001) Teaching statistics with web-technology: The WISE project. Syllabus, 14(7), 43-45.

Aberson, C.L., Berger, D.E., Healy, M.R., & Romero, V.L. (2002). An interactive tutorial for teaching statistical power. Journal of Statistics Education [online], 10 (3).

Aberson, C.L., Berger, D.E., Healy, M.R., & Romero, V.L. (2003). Evaluation of an interactive tutorial for teaching hypothesis testing concepts. Teaching of Psychology, 30, 76-79.

Healy, M.R., Berger, D.E., Romero, V.L., Aberson, C.L., & Saw, A. (2002). Evaluating JAVA appletsfor teaching on the Internet. Proceedings of the Scuola Superiore G. Reis Romoli Advances in Infrastructure for e-Business, e-Education, e-Science, and e-Medicine on the Internet International Conference.

Romero, V. L., Berger, D. E., Healy, M. R., & Aberson, C. L. (2000). Using cognitive learning theoryto design effective on-line statistics tutorials. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 32, 246-249.

Sosa, G.W., Berger, D.E., Saw, A.T., & Mary, J.C. (2010). Effectiveness of Computer-Assisted Instruction in Statistics: A Meta-Analysis. Review of Educational Research, 81(1), 97-128.