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math exercises



teaching-related graphics


classroom topics /
physical-demonstrations



math lecture-notes and texts


educational philosophy


special sites and other ed lists


mostly physics


mostly chemistry


mostly statistics


organizations and
other ed links



particularly speical
insights



this space open







Math Exercises:




Teaching-related Applets and Graphics:




Math Classroom Topics / Physical Demonstrations:


Math Lecture Notes and Texts:




Educational Philosophy (both positive and negative):


  • 'Back to School'
    A mult-part news series on U.S. primary schools from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The first four parts give a brief outline of the history of math education controversy in the U.S.

  • "Marco Learning Systems"
    A compilation of writings on mathematics pedagogy. Articles and online versions of books (for instance, the famous Why Johnny Can't Add) discussing the history of mathematics curricula, and how (and why) to inject enthusiasm in math pedagogy. Indespensible for anyone in teaching.

  • Papert dot org, and Planet Papert.
    Websites devoted to MIT Professor Seymor Papert--educational theorist, devotee of Piaget, co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, and author of the celebrated (in pedagogy circles) Mindstorms, about learning and encorporating technology in math education.

  • Mathematics Education documents
    PDF documents, by Hung-Hsi Wu of Berkeley. Includes papers on such items as why "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally" is a poor way to teach order of operations. Has an anti-reform flavor (imo).

  • Articles by David Bressoud
    Some PDF and TeX - format articles about math teaching, from a reform standpoint.

  • Students Against Testing
    This link is provided not as an endorsement of the site's viewpoints, but rather to remind educators of the frustration and mistrust of testing.

  • "Society for a Return to Academic Standards".
    One professor's compliation of links regarding the debate about declining undergraduate performance.

  • Mathematically Correct dot com
    An anti-reform website.


Special Sites / Other Math Ed Repositories:




Mostly Physics:


  • The Physics Education Resource Association
    To aid physics teachers with demonstrations and lab info. A wealth of physics lab demo projects, and online physics images.

  • "The Physics Supermarket"
    A resource for physics teachers; contains online transparencies, study guides, experiements, and some links to other physics info.

  • Geometric Algebra/Calculus
    Innovation by pro physics-reformer David Hestenes, attempting to teach vectors in a more sophistocated way earlier.


Mostly Chemistry:




Mostly Statistics:


  • Other Lists of Statistics Resources:

    • 'Data Surfing'
      By Robin Lock at St. Lawrence University. Pointers to other data set repositories.


  • Statistics Notes and Test Questions:



  • Statistics Applets:

    • dead links pruned; new links to appear.


  • Statistics Data and Story Libraries:

    • Data files at Stanford
      From an education course. Has many data files, organized by statistical method. Includes a subset of the 1966 Coleman Report data, as well as a very nicely-summarized version of the Vietnam Draft Lottery dataset.

    • Penn State Stat 501 Datasets
      A page full of datasets from a stats course. Some are really interesting (e.g., reported fastest driving speed vs. gender, height, and class row. The documentation for some of the datasests is not great.

    • 'Paleo-Math 101'
      A multi-page set of regression examples using a small real-world dataset from palaeontology (created for The Palaeontology Newsletter). Examples get increasingly complex from 'Regression 1' up.




  • Raw Stat Data (without stories):

  • Statistics Articles, Books, and Discussion Boards:

    • ChanceWiki.
      A 'Wiki' version of 'Chance' magazine by Dartmouth.

    • Radical Statistics.
      Online magazine by British organization devoted to politically-liberal use of statistics. Valuable for examples of statistics applications to social issues, as well as potentially controversial examples. (Unfortunately typeset in distracting font.)

    • The Practice of Statistics
      PDFs of the first six chapters of the AP-standard Moore and Yates text, (like I.P.S. but slightly more mathematical) provided complementarily by the publisher. Especially nice for capturing graphics.


*** many more (unsorted) stat links:



  • The James Lind Library
    The history of exeperimental design as applied to health care.

  • Statistics Notes and Applet Quizzes
    At Murdoch University, Australia. Some very nicely done notes, and some great online quizzes such as matching histograms to boxplots, and guessing mean and median.

  • Exploring Data
    An excellent site done as an education project, partly in conjunction with the University of Queensland. Educators should look here first for all sorts of data, projects, and explanations.

  • Journal of Statistics Education Data Archive
    A Data and Story archive. Good stuff here.

  • The Fallacy Files
    Nicely-done set of pages discussing logical fallacies. The particular use for stats classes is that the site is peppered with examples of fallacies in the news, with comments of a statistical nature.

  • 'Steve's Attempt to Teach Statstics'
    One practicing statistician's online materials. Poorly written in places, but contains some gems, as well as a useful research methodology weblog, plus useful inline links.

  • Statistical Engineering dot com.
    Applied statistics from the standpoint of engineering. Great philosophy, a few good examples to use in introductory classes (most above the elementary level).

  • Tom Short's Statistics Handouts at Villanova and slightly different ones at IUP.
    Many quick stories with accompnaying data sets; or half-hour class projects on data analysis. (No accompnaying solutions).

  • John Holcomb's Intro Stats page
    Class notes and practice exams (all PDF) from an award-winning stats teacher.

  • Statistical Literacy
    A website compilation of links pertaining to elementary-level statistical literacy. Be sure to check out 'teaching stat lit'.

  • Statistical Education
    A section of the American Statistical Association (AMSTAT). Includes back issues of newsletters, as well as links to other stat teaching resources.

  • Statistics and Statistical Graphics Resources
    A large but annotated list of links by Michael Friendly at York University. Quite comprehensive.

  • Links to Teaching Materials in Probability and Statistics
    Many, many links; including online texts and tutorials.

  • Statistics (and some boolean logic) - applets and many links
    Some neat stuff here, for instance this page of java applets demonstrating venn diagrams, and this very interesting illustration of different information depending on graph scale.

  • "Chance"-related teaching aids and some (good) short "chance"-related articles
    Many good, short, real-world statistics problems.

  • Journal of Statistics Education
    Monthly web magazine, available back to 1993. Includes 'teaching bits' brief pointers to news items involving statistics.

  • Data Set Links from Key Curriculum Press
    Scroll down; links to many good data and story sets.

  • DASL ('dazzle'): the 'Data And Story Library'
    Famous historical datastets, cataloged by the CMU stat deptartment. Mostly selected to illustrate an intro statistics topic (like for instance handling outliers). All come with an overview 'story' describing the dataset.

  • A small list of data sets that load directly into Excel
    From the Math Forum at Drexel

  • 'Exploring Data'
    Several common data sets, downloadable in Excel (and other formats); includes a story about the dataset (click on the dataset name). A really nicely done website as part of an education grant.

  • 'Oz-DASL'
    Australian Data And Story Library. Some of these data sets are potentially simple enough for an elementary analysis.

    CMU Dataset Archive
    A potentially useful collection of datasets in text format, some of them large, most with some description. Of potential interest: this dataset on IQ versus Brain Size, and this dataset on ship damage.

  • 'The eeps Data Zoo'
    Small data sets pertaining to physical experiments that were actually done (e.g., hanging a slinky; rolling a ball down a wooden ramp), as well as some real-world data (e.g., height and speed of major roller coasters; track times for the Men's 10-m Olympic run).

  • U.S. Government Database
    Lots of different simple demographic data to select, for the U.S. as well as many other countries. Includes instructions for loading the results into Excel.

  • CDC National Center for Health Statistics
    Lots of PDF data from the U.S. CDC, on births, deaths, health, etc.

  • Google links for 'Health And Nutrition Examination Survey' (HANES)
    Links for the well-known government survey of demographic data.

  • NASA weather station data
    Click on the desired map location to be taken to a list of weather stations near that area

  • NASA rainfall data.
    Select graph type, then click on region of interest on the map.

  • PhD Thesis on History of Statistics Thinking / Education
    Not really a classroom resource, but something I came across when doing a search for the Galton Board. Potentially interesting with regards to how people learn statistics.

    Particularly Speical Insights:
    Here I will highlight writings that I found uniquely illuminated their topic, and which I want to espeically not forget to encorporate into my teaching.

    • Homepage of Jason Howald
      at John Carroll University. Has excellent fine-grained learning objectives for calculus, which I want to emulate in my teaching; as well as animated Maple worksheets for calculus.

    • Essay by Daniel Gottlieb
      Purdue mathematician. Of particular interest is his observation that, "Plato was very excited that ... the square root of 2 was not a rational number. He said that no man could be educated and not know this fact. I wondered why he thought that. Then it occurred to me: There is no way to know that fact by experience. No amount of measuring squares could ever show that the diagonal and the side do not have a common unit of measure." So it is this which makes the oft-seen proof of irrationality of root 2 so significant, and which should be pointed out when the proof is done in classes.

    • Trigonomety and Complex Numbers.
      A brief discussion of trig identities from the standpoint of rotations, by UC Riverside theoretical physicist John Baez.



    Organizations and Other Ed-related Links:



     
     

    last updated on 24 February 2006 by Gordon Weinberg.
    All information subject to change without appearance here.

    This page: http://www.pitt.edu/~gordonw/ed-links.html
    Gordon's homepage: http://www.pitt.edu/~gordonw/

    Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations
    expressed in this material are those of the author
    and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Pittsburgh.