Note: This webpage is mainly devoted to resources to be used in the classroom. Go here for resources mainly devoted to secondary school teachers.

THIS PAGE IS DIVIDED INTO TWO PARTS. THE FIRST PART DESCRIBES RESOURCES AVAILABLE ON THE INTERNET FOR FREE. THE SECOND PART DESCRIBE OTHER RESOURCES (BOTH FREE AND THOSE WITH A COST).

The Advanced Placement (AP) Statistics program is a system by which secondary school students take a university level course in introductory statistics and their own schools. Near the end of the academic year they then take a test. Depending on the score they receive on the test, universities may then grant the students credit for university level introductory statistics. The main website for teachers for the Advanced Placement Program is called AP Central. It requires visitors to register, but there is no charge for registration. The AP Statistics Home Page contains course information, exam information, teaching resource materials, teachers’ resource reviews, feature articles, registration information for an electronic discussion group, and other valuable links. You may view a complete course description and all of the exam questions from 1998 through 2004, as well as scoring guidelines, commentary on student performance, scoring statistics, sample responses, and grade distributions.

The AP Listserver is an excellent resource for all teachers of introductory statistics. You may see a complete archive of the messages posted to the apstat listserver go to You may join the ap-stat listserver.

The CAUSEWEB (Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education ]] site has helpful resources for teaching an introductory statistics course, including class examples, labs, homework assignments, datasets, cartoons, songs, jokes and quotes. This site also houses information about the biennial U.S. Conference on Teaching Statistics, hosted by the Ohio State University.

The United States Census Bureau promotes data literacy by providing teaching tools, resource materials, and workshops through its Census in Schools program. This site includes Program Overview, Teaching Materials, Events, Reference Materials, and Highlights. Under Teaching Materials, there are two lessons using the Census 2000 data. There are Making Sense of Census 2000 Teaching Kits available for grades K-4, 5-8, and 9-12. The 9-12 kit contains several interesting lessons covering map literacy, community involvement, managing data, and maps. A free hard copy of the teaching kits may be obtained that include a 24-page guide and 4’x6’ wall map. (NOTE: A comprehensive listing of resources relating to Census in Schools around the world is located on the ISLP webpage census

HP Data activities is a set of well prepared lesson plans and classroom activities using data and the hewlett packard calculators. The activities can be done with a computer. The main concepts of data handling and chance are explained and there is a lot of on line support for the teachers.

The "Cereal Box" is a very good description, simulation, and extension of the “cereal box” problem that addresses the NCTM Standard for Probability for middle and high school. It also contains a discussion of the theoretical probability model and references. The problem is: Suppose that there are k possible prizes available, one prize per box of Webflakes Cereal. How many boxes of cereal must be purchased on average to obtain all k prizes? The simulation uses neat pictures of animals as the prizes: alligator, elephant, giraffe, lion, otters, spider, swan, and tiger. The ordered sample of pictures chosen is displayed. The user may choose k from 2 to 8

The Chance Project web site contains materials which may be useful in teaching (mainly but not exclusively for 3rd level students) about the concepts of chance and probability, The Chance team have developed a quantitative literacy course with inputs from many courses on Chance given in other (3rd level) institutions. One of the main goals is to help students become more critical in their reading of current events – particularly those using probability and statistics. A monthly newsletter entitled Chance News provides abstracts of articles from current newspapers and journals, together with suggestions for class discussions. There are also some useful Videos and Audios, teaching aids and links to related sites.

The EESEE is a great companion in the classroom. It is full of stories, examples of good and bad uses and interpretations of probability and statistics, lectures, educational applets, and many other things.

DASL (pronounced “dazzle”) is an online library of datafiles and stories that illustrate the use of many basic statistical methods. The objective is to provide data from a wide variety of topics so that statistics teachers can find real-world examples that will be of interest to their students. There is a very good search engine, which allows teachers to find the story or topic or datafile of interest. Each story applies a particular statistical method to a set of data. Each datafile has one or more associated stories. Although some of the datasets and stories and methods are a bit advanced for second level students, others are very accessible.

DIG Stats is an interesting, basic and introductory WWW resource for integrating statistics and data visualization into mathematics and science courses in secondary schools, community colleges and undergraduate programs. In particular, much of it is very accessible to secondary school teachers and students. There are three modules covering concepts from descriptive statistics, inferential statistics, and graphical analysis (two dimensional graphical analysis and three dimensional data visualization). Each module has discussions on various topics (for example in inferential statistics the topics are: t-test, ANOVA, correlation, factorial, regression and chi-squared). Each module has a selection of interesting associated activities, most of which are based on data sets which are available in either Excel or TI-83 format. The activities are well motivated and illustrated nicely with relevant background material.

DISCUSS stands for “Discovering Important Statistical Concepts Using SpreadSheets”, and is a very nicely laid out statistical website developed) mainly (and often updated and modified by Neville Hunt and Sidney Tyrrell of Coventry University. The DISCUSS project is a modified and supplemented web-based implementation of the widely used DISCUS materials for teaching elementary Statistics. It aims to integrate the powerful interactive capabilities of Microsoft Excel with the convenience of web-based resource materials using Microsoft Internet Explorer. At the latest visit, it had 12 chapters or “volumes” on the topics of discussing Charts and Graphs, the Binomial Distribution, the Poisson Distribution, Sampling, Regression and Correlation, Buffon’s Needle problem, Coupon Collecting, Critical Path Analysis and Dice. Each chapter has an introduction and plenty of very clearly motivated examples. In some cases historical background and notes for teachers are given. This resource is highly recommended in particular for its motivation and clarity of presentation.

http://tilastokeskus.fi/tup/verkkokoulu/index_en.html (in English) http://tilastokeskus.fi/tup/verkkokoulu/index.html (in Finnish) The eCourse in Statistics’ main purpose is usage skills of statistics via Statistics Finland’s Internet site. It is offered free of charge and has a total of five study modules on different statistical topics via the Internet. The material is, however, much more general and useful to anyone using the Internet to look at statistics including secondary students studying Mathematics and the Social Sciences and adult learners. eCourse in Statistics contains versatile information on statistics; it makes the basic concepts of statistics familiar and explains the backgrounds of statistical research as well as how statistical data can be used. On eCourse in Statistics one can learn about the basics of statistical thinking and how to read and use statistics. Other subjects that can be studied include demographics, national accounts and indices. eCourse in Statistics also offers instructions and hints for searching for statistical information. The study materials requires no prior statistical knowledge. The material intended for self-study includes exercises and examples of actual statistical data. For more information contact: Ms Reija Helenius at reija.helenius@stat.fi or at +358 9 1734 3677.

The Raybould Tutorial Fellowship in Queensland names a teacher each year as Raybould Fellow who spends a semester on developing a project in senior secondary mathematics. Rex Boggs was the 1997 Raybould Fellow. His project was to provide curriculum support for Exploring Data and make his findings available in a website. Rex did an excellent job in creating this website that contains activities, worksheets, overhead transparency masters, datasets, and assessment to support data exploration. It also contains articles designed to enhance the statistics knowledge of teachers as well as modest lists of other websites, texts, and java applets. Topics include: an introduction to exploring data, looking for patterns, stemplots, dotplots, histograms, measures of location, measures of spread, boxplots, normal plots, scatterplots, assessment, datasets, resources, linear regression, normal distribution, probability, sampling, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, and curve fitting. Datasets are available in three formats: tab delimited, Excel, and NCSS Jr. Navigation is very easy. There is a useful simple search engine for key words.

these are the curriculum guidelines developed by the American Statistical Education for statistical literacy at the primary and secondary levels. They are very comprehensive.

http://www.hs.ttu.edu/hdfs3390/hothand.htm The purpose of this website is to give students resources to study the occurance of streaks (for example, hitting safely in many baseball games consecutively) and other exceptional performances in sports. But, it also contains a comprehensive list of links to websites about statistics and sports.

www.census.gov/ipc/www/idbnew.html (general website) http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idbpyr.html (link directly to Population Pyramids) The International Data Base (IDB) as compiled by the US Census Bureau currently contains statistical tables of demographic and socio-economic data for 227 countries and areas. Population related variables include: births and deaths per 1000 population, rate of natural increase, annual rate of growth, life expectancy at birth (years), infant deaths per 1000 live births, total fertility rate (per woman), midyear population estimates and average annual period growth rates for 1950, 60, 70, 80, and 90, and each year for 2000 to the present, also broken down by age and sex. Other interesting variables include: migration rates by age and sex, marital status, prevalence of contraceptive use by method and age, economically active population size by age, sex, and occupation.

A truly fascinating link is Population Pyramids at http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idbpyr.html that yields two very colorful population pyramids by age and sex of the 227 countries for years 2000 and projected 2025. Population pyramids are extraordinarily interesting and promote extensive classroom discussions. Data are available in a format to load into a spreadsheet and to download to a PC. The user also is given the configurable ability to control many aspects of the appearance of the output. The site has several links, one of which involves data on HIV/AIDS.

The Journal of Statistics Education Information Service web site contains links to several statistical education organizations, newsletters, discussion groups and the online Journal of Statistics Education as well as the JSE Dataset Archives.

(in Swedish) The Internet service "Klassrummet" is targeted at upper secondary schools. The service is meant for both teachers and pupils. The service includes various mini-surveys which the teachers can conduct in the classroom and afterwards compare the results with similar surveys conducted by other educational institutions. Educational institutions can also check their community profile and compare their own community with others. The service also includes a Net School in statistics which offers briefs and articles on statistics and their use. In addition to the net service, Statistics Sweden also organizes various training courses and seminars for their customers. These courses and seminars are not free of charge.

This is a year 2006 publication of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe intended as a practical tool to help managers, statisticians and media relations officers use text, tables, graphics and other information to bring statistics to life using effective writing techniques. The document could be used also in introductory statistics courses that emphasizes interpreting data rather than formulas and numbers. It teaches good writing techniques and has plenty of examples comparing good and bad stories based on numbers.

The North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (NCSSM) is a superb two-year, public, residential high school in Durham, North Carolina. The Mathematics and Computer Science Department of NCSSM has sponsored four excellent institutes to date for teachers to learn more about statistics and the teaching of statistics in 1999 (four weeks), 2000, 2001, and 2004. Instructors for the institutes including some of the very top statistics educators in the United States.

These institutes are very high-powered and the level for most of them is for those high school teachers who want a much deeper understanding of statistics, far beyond what they would be expected to offer in their classrooms. Clicking on the 1999 Statistics Institute link produces copies of the extensive notes presented on the topics of theory of inference, regression analysis, experimental design, and categorical data analysis and surveys. The 2000 institute replicated that of 1999 but added the helicopter project in experimental design as well as a new section on blocking, a sampling exercise on the river problem, and 45 excellent pages of web-based resources and activities for advanced placement statistics teachers. In 2001, the emphasis was on creating materials that would help teachers teach the experimental design part of the advanced placement statistics course. The notes are provided for the areas of probability and simulation, a closer look at experimental design, statistical inference scenarios, sample statistical exploration, probability games, and many laboratory activities using JMP INTRO. The topic for 2004 focuses on experimental design.

The NCTM Illuminations (huge) website is designed to illuminate new vision for school mathematics as presented in NCTM’s Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (2000). Each grade band (preK-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12, and across the grades) contains five sections: I-Math Investigations of ready-to-use interactive multimedia lessons; selected web resources of the best carefully reviewed Internet math resources found by their panel; Internet-Based lesson plans of classroom-ready lessons developed by expert teachers; Interactive Mathlets of java applets that can be used to explore mathematics and to create interactive lessons; and, Inquiry on Practice of video vignettes, research reports, and article for teachers to encourage thinking and discussion on teaching and learning.

The site is devoted to all of mathematics, so there is some searching to be done to find items specifically dedicated to statistics. It is well worth the search. For example, under grades 9-12, Lessons, there is a very good lesson on Exploring Linear Data, as well as Exploring the Birthday Paradox using a Monte Carlo simulation and graphing calculators. Interpreting the Real-Life Meaning of Graphical Representations of Data has eight excellent lessons.

Of special interest is scrolling to the bottom of the grades 9-12, I-math page and clicking on Standards for Grades 9-12: Data Analysis and Probability. There are 45 resources listed in the section in the middle of the I-Math page called Selected Web Resources. Each of them has a careful review presented and where to find the link. The resources are: Polling – Choosing a Sample; World Shopping Spree; Airfares; The Problem of Points; Internet Projects for Elementary Statistics; Rice Virtual Lab in Statistics; K-12 statistics; Polling – Writing Questions; Polling – Sample Variation and the Margin of Error; Data Collecting in the Classroom; Buffon’s Needle; Global Warning; Probability by Surprise; Rock On; You Light up my Life; Planet Earth – Almost 6 Billion Served; Epidemic Proportions; El Nino or El No-No; First Class First? Using Data to Explore the Tragedy of the Titanic; How Many Combinations; The Economics of Professional Sports Comparative Advantage and Specialization; The Big Mac Index; Salaries; The Letters of the Alphabet; Plan Your Own Trip to Asia or Africa!!!; Where Will you Decide to Live?; ACC Basketball – Comparing Statistics; How Far Do I Travel, How Far Do I Go?; Ms. Reddy’s Stock WebQuest; Looking at Statistics Through Circles; A Functional Housing Market; Trips; Probability Computer Projects with Mathematics; Numbers in Search of a Problem; Web Stat 2.0; The Cereal Box Problem; The Million $ Mission; The Hermit’s Epidemic; Imperfect Prediction; Statistics – Polls, What do the numbers tell us?; The Data and Story Library; Population Growth and Balance; Stick or Switch; The Mathematics of Airline Safety.

On this site, there are 313 full-text newspaper articles from The Mercury in Hobart, and other News Limited newspapers throughout Australia are available. Most articles have linked questions for students and discussions for teachers. You can recognize these pages of content by the following icons. Newspaper Articles, Student Questions, Teacher Discussion. The articles and questions have not been designated for particular grade levels. This is because there is likely to be a wide range of literacy and numeracy skills in any given class. Many articles have associated with them both basic numeracy questions and more advanced questions for senior students. Teachers will need to peruse questions and decide which are appropriate for particular students.

http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/math/high-statistics.html Although not all of the 19 resources at this site truly contain statistics and probability, it is still a wonderful site to find interesting contexts in marketing, polling, financial markets, sampling methods, rhythmic combinations in jazz/blues, baseball, and space. Each resource contains such items as learning objectives, necessary materials, estimated time, teaching procedure, extensions, online resources and relevant national standards. Resource titles include: Class in America; The Democracy Project; Electric Money; First Measured Century; Harriman Expedition; Jazz; Ken Burns American Stories; and NOVA presentations on space.

in Project Interactivate of the Shodor Education Foundation, Inc. (2002) http://www.shodor.org/master/interactivate/activities/index.html#pro Included on this excellent site are instructional resources for including probability, statistics and other mathematical concepts, with software ready to be used in the classroom The goals of Project Interactivate are the creation, collection, evaluation, and dissemination of java-based courseware for middle school mathematics explorations. “Interactivated” lessons, discussions, and activities enable the teacher to extend hands-on activities and to teach new content areas with professional competence and confidence, incorporating technology in appropriate ways. Each activity comes with supplementary What, How, and Why pages, which are accessed from the activity pages. Amongst the many interesting activities are those involving the stock exchange, boxplots, stem-and-leaf plots, and skewness. The lessons are designed to give teachers a script to follow when using the activities and discussions developed. Each lesson gives prerequisites, preparation instructions, a suggested outline, and alternate outlines. The discussions are designed to give teachers ideas for how to introduce or explain a concept with a student or with a class. The activities are arranged according to the NCTM Principles and Standards for School Mathematics and the NCEE Performance Standards for Middle (secondary) School in the USA:

Rice Virtual Lab is a well laid out site which contains sections entitled Hyperstat Online, Simulations/Demonstrations, Case Studies and Analysis Lab. The Hyperstat Online is essentially an online statistics book with links to many other statistics resources on the web. The site is really aimed at the 3rd level, but it has some nice simulations and demonstrations with applets which might be useful to secondary school teachers on basic topics like means/medians, regression and correlation by eye, and sampling distributions. In Case Studies there are some interesting examples with real data and discussions.

http://www.amstat.org/education/stn/index.html and then click on “Current Issue”. (Note: If this gives you the wrong issue, then click on “Previous Issues” and then choose “Number 68...” This is an issue of The Statistics Teacher Network newsletter devoted entirely to implementation of the American Statistical Association’s “A Curriculum Framework for Pre K-12 Statistics Education”. It was written by Christine Franklin & Gary Kader. In this article they explain the guidelines and give example activities.

The Smart Centre is a project hosted at Durham University and focused on envisioning data and reasoning from evidence. In particular, they created displays to present data in ways that can be understood, and to stimulate debate about important issues, grounded on good evidence. The most useful activities for teachers can be found at the site Freeware activity . The activities analyze multivariate data sort of dynamically. Unfortunately, the user can not compare graphs from one period to the next, because the image appears only in one web page. Most of the graphs are bar graphs, with exceptionally a few scatter plots. You also may choose to import your data and analyze its multivariate nature with the tool created at the utility for entering your multivariate data.

http://www.statlit.org/ An interesting site with lots of information dealing with Statistical Literacy in general - including books, links, stories, teaching, events and items in the news about Statistical Literacy. Accessible to almost everyone, the focus is on causality - not just on the numbers in statistics. Emphasis is on data and arguments about causality based on observational studies in business, economics, sociology, epidemiology and history. The site addresses how much support statistics may give a possible causal argument as opposed to suggesting just association.

The SOCR resources are free internet applets that help understand important concepts in Statistics taught in the classroom via experimentation. There are a large variety of experiments, distributions, games and data summary tools. But the most important feature of this resource is the set of activities already prepared which are attached to many of the applets. These activities, are complete exercises to conduct in a lab or in the classroom or as homework, with detailed instructions as to what the students have to do to learn the concept and assessment exercises at the end to see if the student understood. These activities also have detailed description of what the students have to do to obtain the results; thus the student does not have to waste time learning where to click.

This is a series of introductory statistics lectures. As of July 2003, the site includes lessons on univariate and bivariate descriptive statistics. RealPlayer (free download) is required to view the lectures. Univariate topics include graphics (histogram, boxplot, and stemplots); number summaries (mean, median, mode, range, interquartile range, standard deviation); and a case study on lead exposure on a child’s development). Bivariate topics include graphics (mosaic plot, side-by-side boxplots, and scatterplot); number summaries (correlation, regression); and the case study revisited for bivariate considerations. JMP is included that displays all the material covered. Lectures last from 5 minutes to almost 20. Although the site has a lot of work yet to do, both on what has been started as well as topics to be covered, it is worth a look, especially the case study. The site will be beneficial for both teachers and students.

STATS claims that it is a resource for journalists which provides timely and well researched analyses of current statistical and scientific disputes – largely American oriented. It works towards achieving a better understanding of scientific and social research – with considerable attention being paid to spurious statistical claims. Most of the material covered falls into the general areas of crime, environment, food, health/medicine, socials issues, technology, business and miscellaneous science. VitalSTATS is a monthly newsletter, and Newsclips contains opinion articles. Not directly a teaching resource, but has a lot of interesting and thought provoking material. It is a good site for Statistical Literacy

http://www.anu.edu.au/nceph/surfstat/surfstat-home/surfstat.html The SurfStat project started in 1994 with the brave but naive intent of making an existing set of course notes available online as hypertext. It has since grown to include an extensive glossary, interactive exercises, JavaScript functions replacing statistical probability tables, and the beginnings of a set of Java applets demonstrating statistical concepts through dynamic graphics. It is the primary learning resource for students taking STAT101 at the University of Newcastle, Australia.

http://figurethis.org (In English) http://figurethis.org/espanol.htm (In Spanish) There are 80 different and interesting challenges of a numerical nature – aimed at middle and secondary school students. One index classifies them into algebra, geometry, number, measurement and statistics and probability. For each challenge there is an option to visit Hint, getting started, did you know, think about this, try these as well as an answer. There are also corners for teachers and families. A well constructed website.

faculty.vassar.edu/lowry/VassarStats.html (for the website) faculty.vassar.edu/lowry/webtext.html (for the textbook) The VassarStats web site is a useful and user-friendly tool for statistical computation. The accompanying text Concepts and Applications of Inferential Statistics is a free, full-length, and occasionally interactive statistics textbook. Richard Lowry, Professor of Psychology at Vassar College is the author of both sites. They are extremely well done. Note that the sites include all procedures appropriate for an advanced placement statistics course (USA) and beyond.

VassarStats is a computational site that describes the calculation to be made including very interesting examples. The user inputs data, sometimes from a spreadsheet, in the areas of probabilities including Bayes’ Theorem (in addition to a separate Clinical Research calculator that calculates sensitivity, specificity, predictive values and much more), distributions (Binomial, Poisson, Chi-Square, t, correlation, Normal through Central Limit Theorem and standard errors), procedures applicable to categorical frequency data (including Fisher’s Exact test and log-linear analysis for a 3-way contingency table), procedures applicable to ordinal data (through one factor independent and correlated analyses), correlation and regression, t-tests, one and two factor anova, analysis of covariance, and some miscellanea such as resampling estimates for two independent means and power for the Chi-Square Goodness of Fit test.

The text is very well written. It introduces most topics from a conceptual point of view, includes wonderful examples, and provides the appropriate formulas. The topics cover principles of measurement, distributions, introduction to correlation and regression, a first glance of statistical significance, basic concepts of probability, sampling distributions, tests of significance, chi-square procedures, an introduction to testing one mean, estimation, two independent samples, correlated samples, anova for independent samples, anova for correlated samples, two-way anova for independent samples, analysis of covariance.

http://www.kuleuven.ac.be/ucs/java/index.htm This is an interesting collection of (over 30) Java Applets developed and operated by a group at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belguim to enhance statistical visualization of distributions and basic techniques. These tools are grouped into the four areas of :Basics, Statistical Tests, Regression and Anova. Much of these (in particular the group of Basics) are accessible to secondary school teachers and students. For example in Basics, one can simulate observations from continuous (normal, chi-square, F, t, or uniform) or discrete (binomial or Poisson) distributions with different parameters, and nicely visualize resulting histograms, boxplots and distributions of the corresponding sample means and variances. Could provide a lot of interesting material for statistical computing sessions accompanying basic courses in statistics.

http://www.math.uah.edu/stat/ The goal of this project is to provide free, high quality, interactive, web-based resources for students and teachers of probability and statistics. One will find an integrated set of components that includes expository text, applets, data sets, graphics, and other elements. The three main sections are Probability, Statistics, and Special Models. Each of these sections in turn contains a list of topics (for example in Probability one will find the topics Probability Spaces, Combinatorics, Distributions and Expected Value) each of which contains a textbook type description together with some applets. These applets are the most interesting part of the resource, and some are very enjoyable to work with (for example under Games of Chance in Special Models, the applets dealing with Chuck-a-Luck, Roulette, the Monty Hall problem and craps are particularly interesting, and the Poisson Experiment helps understand Poisson processes nicely). The material is relatively self-contained and is aimed at the introductory university level or secondary school level. The principal author is Kyle Siegrist, who earlier produced the book (with software) entitled Interactive Probability (Wadsworth Publishing, 1996) and which contains much of this material.

Web Interface for Statistical Education (WISE), is a set of tutorials and guided exercises on some of the main statistical concepts encountered in the introductory statistics class. The tutorials and exercises use applets. The material is appropriate both for teachers and for students. The project is hosted at Claremont graduate school.

Lappan, Glenda; Fey, James T.; Fitzgerald, William M.; Friel, Susan N; and Phillips, Elizabeth D. Data Around Us. Published by Dale Seymour Publications, Palo Alto, California, USA), 1997. (Note: Dale Seymour Publications is now part of Pearson Learning Group) Teacher’s Edition, ISBN 1-57232-638-7 ( ISBN 13: 978-1-57232-638-5), 140 Pages, US $16.50. Student Edition, ISBN 1-57232-637-9 (ISBN 13: 978-1-57232-637-8), 72 Pages, US $5.95 This book is part of the textbook series called Connected Mathematics Project. It is well-written and fun. It is activity-based and students of all levels seem to enjoy it and learn from it. Aimed at ages 11 to 14.