Support for long-term classroom planning and professional development. Information covering important topics for today's educators and parents. The series, consisting of five one-hour videos, presents actual problems suitable for statistical analysis. In each case the video demonstrates how data are collected and used in making decisions with respect to cost, quality, or detection of abnormalities. This video includes an introductory module consisting of a montage of statistical applications relating, for example, to the most likely time of day for lightning strikes, how doctors determine whether children are growing at a normal rate, the manatee's battle with boats and extinction, and intervention to save the food chain in the Chesapeake Bay via soil sampling.
Subsequent modules illustrate various applications of statistical concepts.
For example, stemplots were used to obtain a distribution of United States Army recruits' head sizes. As a result, the Army saved money by deciding to stock all but the unusual sizes of helmets and to custom fit the unusual sizes. The video also gives examples of histograms and boxplots, as well as measures of center and standard deviation, showing how these statistical measures provide bases for decision making in public television programming, in comparing nutritional and calorie values for various brands of hot dogs, and in detecting abnormal body conditions via urine samples. The philosophy of this series is to take students out of the classroom via video, allowing them to see a variety of applied statistics, while computer animated graphics simultaneously display terms and present graphs of the data. Each of the 21 modules is designed to be used independently to focus on a specific statistics concept, or to be integrated with other material in a statistics class.