Fully funded by the National Science Foundation and Amazon, STATS4STEM provides a collection of learning, assessment, computing, and tutoring resources for statistics educators and their students. Our assessment and tutoring feature maintains a question library of introductory and AP Statistics questions that can be easily assigned to students. The questions allow for instantaneous student feedback with question specific hints for students who are struggling. In addition, real-time learning charts and reports are available to help educators adapt instruction to meet the individual needs of their students. Finally, in an effort to foster community, our site integrates an educator message board for statistics educators looking to share ideas, tips, and insights with other statistics educators worldwide.
STATS4STEM is free. It is funded by the National Science Foundation and Amazon Web Services.
Any high school, college, or university educator worldwide who teaches statistics or a course related to statistics can register.
Yes! We welcome educators worldwide.
The most important thing for our website is that our assessment items remain secure. This is something we take very seriously. To do this, we need to ensure that all individuals requesting educator access are in fact educators to ensure that assessment items remain secure. Having said this, once an individual registers as an educator, we use the provided registration information to vet the individual to ensure it is from a genuine teacher. Once our team has determined a registration to be legitimate, that educator will receive a confirmation email informing them that they can then login to their new teacher account. Our team strives to keep this wait time under 24 hours. Apologies for any convenience this may cause.
If you appreciate the website, the three biggest things that one can do to help our project is:
1) tell other statistics educators about us
2) add a STATS4STEM link to your website (we really love this!)
3) promoting us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
1) tell other statistics educators about us
2) add a STATS4STEM link to your website (we really love this!)
3) promoting us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
Simple, you begin by creating your classes. Then, once classes have been made, a unique code is provided for you to give to students while they register. Once your students have registered, using the code you provide automatically adds them to your class.
Our site has a large collection of statistics assessment questions that can be assigned to students. Once the questions have been assigned, students can work through the questions and receive instant feedback. In addition, when a student finds themselves struggling to solve a problem, he or she has a chance to request help in the form of question-specific hints. Most questions have between 2 to 5 hints, and each hint progresses the student closer to the answer. The last hint is always the answer so that the student can move on to the next question. These questions are categorized by concepts typically found in an introductory statistics course in college or the AP Statistics course at the high school level.
All the questions we create are categorized by concepts typically found in an introductory statistics course in college or the AP Statistics course at the high school level.
Absolutely! All teacher accounts provide the option to create custom made questions should our test bank of questions not suffice. Furthermore, the option is also available to make a copy of an exisiting question, and modify it to meet your needs.
Yes, teachers have the option of using pre-made assignments created by others, or they can create their own assignments by hand-picking the specific questions that they want their students to complete. Both options are available to all teachers. The platform strives to be as flexible to the needs of different teachers.
Yes, once assignments have been created, they can easily be shared by teachers across the hall or across the globe.
Students can be asked any of the following question types and the prevalence:
1. Numeric answer only
2. Multiple Choice
3. Check all that apply
4. Fill-in
5. Free Response
1. Numeric answer only
2. Multiple Choice
3. Check all that apply
4. Fill-in
5. Free Response
Virtually all questions found in our system have question specific hints associated with them. Thus, when a student is struggling with a problem, he or she has a chance to request help in the form of hints. Most questions have between 2 to 5 hints, and each hint progresses the student closer to the answer. The last hint is always the answer so that the student can move on to the next question.
Yes, our platform provides the option for teachers to assign both release and due dates for assignments.
Yes, late assignments are tracked in the teacher dashboard.
Questions that have answers that are numeric, multiple-choice, fill-in, or check-all-that-apply are worth 1 point each. For numeric answers, the students gets 1 point if he or she answers the question correctly on the first attempt. If the student fails to answer the question correctly, but answers the numeric question on the second or third attempt, 0.5 points is awarded. For multiple-choice, check-all-that-apply, and fill-in, students have only 1 attempt to get full credit. Finally, free response is graded 0, 1, 2, or 3 by the teacher.
Teachers must manually grade all the free response questions in the teacher dashboard section of the website. Each question can be scored 0, 1, 2, or 3.
Excellent question, this is something that our team has spent months working on to address. Our platform is set up to accept answers within a specific range. This acceptable range of rounding error is custom to each problem to reduce the number of false negatives. In short if a student does the problem correctly, we want our platform to mark the student as correct. When this doesn't happen, this creates problems for both the student, but also for the teacher. So we strive to minimize this issue as much as possible with our advanced question development process.
Yes, when you assign a question to a class, you will be presented with the option to assign the questions in linear or random order. If you choose linear, all students will be presented with the assignment questions in the same order. If you choose random, the order that students are presented with assignment questions will be randomized.
Yes, the dashboard provides information on the number of hints students use.
First, any time a student uses a hint, he or she automatically gets the question wrong, and their average goes down. Second, teachers can view how many hints are used by each student. Finally, teachers can control the delay between hints, in seconds, to prevent abuse of hints and to promote more active use of the information provided in the hints.
Yes. When teachers are assigning an assignment, they will be presented with the option of assigning the assignment to the entire class (one or multiple sections), specific sections, or individual students.
Tutor mode is for meant more for formative assesssments (like homework) while paper test mode is more for summative assessments (like quizzes and tests). While using tutor mode, hints are available and the correctness of each answer is given. While using paper test mode, students are presented with all the questions at once and students are only told that their answer has been recorded, nothing more. In addition, during paper test mode, no hints are available.
A teacher’s dashboard is an integral component of STATS4STEM. The dashboard is a collection of reports and real-time interactive graphs that contains aggregate and individual student assessment data. This dashboard provides each teacher with the necessary information, in real time, to assess student learning of assigned problem sets. This information can then be used to modify teaching methods as well as classroom pace to help improve student learning.
R is a free open-source statistics package used around the world. It has become arguageable the most powerful statistics package in the world.
RStudio is simply an interface for using R. When someone is working within RStudio, they are using R.
All registered users get their own individual RStudio accounts. So both teachers and students get their own individual accounts.
No, RStudio is 100% optional. For all of our tutorials or questions that require some element of computing, we provide hints and/or guidance using both the TI-83/84 calculator and RStudio. So if a student wants to use the TI-83/84, this is completely acceptable and no issues should arise.
For students looking to learn specific topics, our site offers students a collection of help pages and eight free textbooks.
Help pages provide a blend of text, worked examples, and video lessons to help students learn specific statistics or R topics. Help pages are currently being built to cover statistics concepts typically covered in an introductory statistics or AP Statistics course. In addition, our project is building a collection of help pages for introductory R programming concepts to help student learn R and RStudio.
Our website incorporates an embedded discussion forum to foster community among other statistics educators worldwide. More than two decades of research has demonstrated the importance of collaboration among teachers. When teachers have the opportunity to discuss and learn from each other, the quality of their practice and student outcomes improve.