STATISTICS ASSESSMENT: THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY

摘要

Assessment tasks and scoring schemes convey information to students and teachers about the nature of each discipline, and what is valued. It is important that tasks provoke desirable classroom practices, and motivate students to continue to engage with the discipline. Tasks from high-stakes national examinations are presented that are likely to have the opposite effect; Most are 'toy' problems where a technical exercise is presented in a context which is uninteresting and oversimplified. In contrast, we show tasks that engage students in reasoning with authentic data from large scale surveys, and that require statistical reasoning to challenge assertions about matters of fact or plausible courses of action. We believe that better tasks are an important element in addressing Hand's (2009) concerns about the public image of statistics.