The Role of Dynamic Interactive Technology in Teaching and Learning Statistics

Dynamic interactive technology brings new opportunities for helping students learn central statistical concepts. Research and classroom experience can be help identify concepts with which students struggle, and an \"action-consequence\" pre-made technology document can engage students in exploring these concepts. With the right questions, students can begin to make connections among their background in mathematics, foundational ideas that undergrid statistics and the relationship these ideas. The ultimate goal is to have students think deeply about simple and basic statistical ideas so they can see how they lead to reasoning and sense making about data and about making decisions about characteristics of a population from a sample.Technology has a critical role in teaching and learning statistics, enabling students to use real data in investigations, to model complex situations based on data, to visualize relationships using different representations, to move beyond calculations to interpreting statistical processes such as confidence intervals and correlation, and to generate simulations to investigate a variety of problems including laying a foundation for inference. Thus, graphing calculators, spreadsheets, and interactive dynamic software can all be thought of as tools for statistical sense making in the service of developing understanding