No abstract

Many students who enroll in introductory statistics courses do not have positive attitudes about the subject. A 2012 wide-ranging study by Schau and Emmioglu showed that student attitudes do not tend to improve after completing an introductory statistics course. However, there is a need for more studies about attitudes in introductory statistics courses that utilize reform teaching methods. In this article, we present findings about student attitudes toward statistics in both a teacher-centered lecture-based class and a studentcentered active learning class, taught by the same instructor. The overall results of this study were consistent with those reported in the study by Schau and Emmioglu. Although on an overall level, it seemed that attitudes did not change for both classes, when each attitude component was analyzed on a deeper level, from both a quantitative and a qualitative perspective, differences were found between the two classes for the components of Effort, Affect and Cognitive Competence, Interest, and Difficulty.

No abstract

Throughout history, storytelling has been used as a way to appeal to people’s imagination and emotions. When stories are told in the mathematics classroom, the subject comes to life. Students begin to understand the purpose of learning the content, and mathematics becomes something greater than a plethora of irrelevant facts and formulas that are meant to be memorized, applied, and repeated. This workshop focuses on the use of storytelling as a way to engage students in a nontraditional and pertinent form of learning mathematics. In this session, participants will listen to stories used with predominantly Arab students in an American university in Qatar and partake in doing mathematical tasks related to the stories presented. Although the stories in this workshop were applied in an Arab context, the ideas can be edited for use in any cultural context.