Posts tagged as:

teaching

UCF cheating scandal

November 18, 2010

A major cheating scandal at UCF was discovered - and resolved - through a relatively simple statistical analysis of midterm results. The team was able to identify students who cheated on their midterm exam with high confidence. Professor Richard Quinn's announcement of those findings was captured in this video of his lecture: (Via The Daily [...]

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Enlightenment

September 11, 2009

A relatively new program has been devised, with the blessing of the Dalai Lama, to instruct Tibetan monks and nuns in science and math. These students have little or no formal education in that area, but are adept learners and take to the material quickly and with interest. My favorite quote from the NYT's report: [...]

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Statistics: desired and feared?

August 10, 2009

My former department chair, Xiao-Li Meng, has published an excellent article on the emergent role of statistics and the challenge of teaching the science to non-statisticians. He addresses the negative perception of the field, often ingrained by a poor high school experience and summed up in a dismissive scoff that "the best speaker in statistics" [...]

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On teaching math

June 29, 2009

Arthur Benjamin gives a short (3 minute) TED talk on the problems with how math is taught to high school students in America. He notes that the current curriculum is a sequence beginning with arithmatic and leading to the ultimate goal of calculus. But calculus isn't something most people use once they graduate - how [...]

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