Abstract:

Subjects like statistics typically require greater mental effort than other subjects. Attendance is often not enough for many students. Teachers are aware of this and will, in many cases, try to help students. We have designed different types of ICT-based materials that can help students in various ways. We offer PowerPoint interactive presentations, applets with the free software GeoGebra and videos of how to use the Excel spreadsheet. Each type of material has its own purpose.

Interactive presentations can provide step-by-step explanations of theoretical and practical statistical issues. Throughout the presentations we set different display breaks so that students can control the speed according to their assimilation level. The presentations show sequential explanations in a highly graphical mode, in an effort to avoid excessive text reading and to guide students' attention through proper reasoning. These presentations also include test questions so that students can check their level of understanding. The student clicks on one of the options offered and automatically gets a response. If correct, a sequential explanation of the solution appears and if incorrect, the user must choose another option.

GeoGebra applets allow students to experiment with different statistical tools in a practical framework. Here they can find answers to what-if questions and, therefore, improve their understanding of concepts which they sometimes find highly abstract.

Finally we have made videos on how to use the Excel spreadsheet to help students with basic questions, but which may be an obstacle in the practical classes. These videos allow teachers and students to focus on the statistical aspects of practical classes rather than computational aspects.
The evaluation of the experiment carried out in the 2013-2014 course with these materials has been satisfactory, both according to the assessment made by the students and the level of use thereof. In an on-line survey about 85% of students declared that they used some of these and the average score was higher than 3.5 (on a scale 1-5) for the three types of materials.

Keywords:

ICT-based resources, interactive presentations, applets, videos.