A Study of Undergraduate Understanding of Sampling Variability and Regression

Project-SET is an NSF funded project aimed at developing teacher level materials to better facilitate student learning in statistics. The project is focused on two statistics topics; sampling variability and linear regression. After an extensive literature review, four instructional videos aimed at introducing sampling variability and regression were created, two videos per topic of interest. To test the teaching capabilities of these videos, a pre- and post-test was administered to two college level statistics courses at Loyola Marymount University before and after they viewed the videos. Participants provided definitions, solved problems, and rated their confidence in answering questions pertaining to each topic. Results indicate that the videos allowed students to gain a significant amount of confidence in answering questions regarding both topics, however their ability to correctly solve questions on these topics did not improve. Upon further analysis of our data, student misconceptions about sampling variability and linear regression were identified to help direct modifications in future iterations of the instructional videos