Constructive statistics: feeding off your own dataset

Abstract

Contemporary approaches to teaching and learning statistics involve the use of elaborate datasets, which are stored in spreadsheet format. While modern textbooks supply a collection of datasets on disk media or via companion web sites, there is substantial merit in having the learners in a classroom collaboratively build a dataset on a single spreadsheet, and begin their explorations. This paper highlights some constructivist ways in which cloud spreadsheets can be employed to illustrate basic as well as advanced concepts in statistics.