PROCEEDINGS OF THE 20TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2017
San Diego, California
Technology use in the teaching and learning of an introductory statistics course: The case of Excel and the ‘Knitr’ R-package
Page: 1553
We cannot imagine teaching statistics today without using some form of technology. Teaching statistics courses in the past was very challenging due to time consumption in calculation. The computation is now done by computer and other software packages but the challenge now is that understanding the results and staying mistrustful to the results. In this discussion, we will discuss how we have been teaching introductory statistics courses with or without computer and provide some typical examples in excel spreadsheet. On the other hand, due to the recent development of the power of computing, we present a dynamic documentation of computational outputs from a statistical programming language using R markdown (included in the package “knitr”) which is a simple formatting syntax for authoring HTML, PDF, and MS Word documents. Hence the main goal of this presentation is to give an outline of the method used in the past, its challenges as mentioned by Christine Duller (2008) and a demonstration of an R package which recently brought a great attention to the teachers of statistics and researchers. The usefulness of the package will be presented using some data analysis and graphs using R programming language. Since R Markdown supports dozens of static and dynamic output formats including HTML, Pdf, MS Word, Beamer, HTML slides, Tufte-style handouts, books, dashboards, shiny applications, scientific articles, websites, and more, it is more popular to the researcher, teacher of statistics and collaborators.