Abstract:

Traditional teaching methodology is mainly focused on giving lectures, so that the students receive knowledge instead of being involved in their learning process. Neither the teachers obtain feedback from the students’ progresses, nor do the students realize how much they have understood. People should take part in their own learning, which means to participate in the process of construction of their own knowledge. Particularly, in subjects of Statistics, the students need to understand a number of tools and techniques as well as to develop their reasoning for an appropriate application of them in practice. Therefore, classroom activities can be designed to encourage students to think and reason about statistical arguments, where real data sets can be used for their motivation. In this respect, the Microsoft Excel can be an adequate tool for achieving the referred outcomes, because of its simplicity and the fact of being widely available on personal computers. Some statistical functions and plots implemented in Excel allow the students to practice a great number of the statistical concepts, provided that adequate files are supplied, and they can even interact with Excel to produce the results.

Keywords:

statistical reasoning, student-centred learning, technological tools.