Abstract:

Statistics and data analysis are required by many disciplines. Although statistical ideas and principles are in the curricula of the students from secondary to university, probability, distribution and hypothesis testing or inference concepts are hard to understand for students, generating frustration and anxiety.
Statistics is no easy, but using new instructional tools can help to deep conceptual understanding and to improve student achievement.
Simulation is one of more promising tools. Teaching with data simulations give students opportunities to generate data under different empirical situations; situations controlled by the student; that experimental and controlled context can help to answer a particular research question or to resolve a statistical problem. Simulating data in an interactive non passive way, it can be especially helpful in the classroom to facilitate student understanding of concepts that have traditionally been very difficult to learn. Several studies showed that students trained using simulations performed better at related tasks than students who learned using a course book and paper/pencil exercises.
However, simulation is a tool that needs to be used in a correct way in order to get the expected results. That is, as recommended by several authors, simulation is effective after introductory information in a highly structured learning context. Simulation offers a lot of possibilities for presenting the basic statistical ideas in a relevant, meaningful and non mathematical way. In this paper we show one teaching example based in the concept of statistical power, which is one o harder to understand for our students.

Keywords:

New technologies, simulation, teaching statistics.