INSPIRE: INsight into Statistical Practice, Instruction and REasoning
 
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What is INSPIRE?

INSPIRE is a course designed for high school AP statistics teachers who are novices at statistics.  The INSPIRE project is a joint effort of California Polytechnic State University, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the American Statistical Association that combines the talents professional statisticians, experienced high school statistics teachers, and college statistics educators.

Although INSPIRE was originally designed as a two-year course, the course is now a one semester distance course. 

INSPIRE Course Starts February 1, 2010. Register now!!!

INSPIRE, Statistics X 402.2, will be offered through UCLA Extension for a 16-week course beginning February 1, 2010 and ending May 17, 2010. Participants who complete the course will receive 5 units of university credit. The cost is $445.

This online course covers the advanced placement statistics curriculum (experimental design, descriptive statistics, inferential statistics) from a teacher's point of view. Based on the NSF-funded INsight into Statistical Practice, Instruction and REasoning (INSPIRE), the course was designed by experienced high school AP statistics instructors and college educators, including former Chief Reader Roxy Peck. Participants study one AP topic each week by doing activities, short self-graded homework exercises, and data analysis exercises. "Teaching tips" and other resources are introduced to help teachers prepare students for the AP exam. The 4-unit version of this course was a trial version offered as part of an NSF-funded grant. The opinion of the principal investigators, based on an external evaluation that included interviews with participants, was that 4 units was not sufficient to cover a class that required roughly 6-8 hours per week of work. This new version will be even more intense, as the original 32-week course has been condensed to 16 weeks, and we anticipate that students will need to devote about 10 hours per week. While the list of topics is the same, more work is required, including the addition of weekly homework and periodic quizzes. Prerequisite: A bachelor's degree. Participants should either be currently teaching a high school statistics course or have recently taught one. This is not an introductory statistics course; students interested in introductory statistics should enroll in Statistics XL 10.

Required Text and Software Please purchase Fathom, which is the software we will use. Although this software is required, it is possible to use another statistical software package (but NOT a TI calculator), although we cannot provide instruction. The student edition (for about $40) is sufficient. Key Curriculum Press is offering a 10 percent discount for participants in INSPIRE for the single user license only. To get the discount, include a note in the comments section of the "shopping cart" that says Participant in INSPIRE online course. 10% discount on Fathom Single User per Allyndreth Devlin. Note that the discount will not be applied upon checkout, but will be applied later when the credit card is processed.

Prerequisite: A bachelor's degree.  Participants should either be currently teaching a high school statistics course or have recently taught one.

To register online, please visit www.uclaextension.edu and click on "Quick Enroll" and enter Reg# V6691. Complete the online enrollment form for secure registration.  

Enrollment by Phone:
Use American Express, Discover, MasterCard, or VISA. Call (310) 825-9941 or (818) 784-7006.  

Instructor: Kevin Nicols, with "guest stars" Corey Andreasen, Floyd Bullard, and Chris Olsen  



Table of Contents

Unit 1: Exploring Data
 Unit 2: Two-variable Relationships
Unit 3: More Two-variable relationships
 Unit 4:  Collecting Data
Unit 5: The Normal Distribution
 Unit 6: Probability Essentials
Unit 7: Random Variables and their PDFs
 Unit 8: Simulating Probabilities
Unit 9: Sampling Distributions
 Unit 10: Confidence Intervals
Unit 11: Hypothesis Tests
 Unit 12: Comparing Two Populations
Unit 13: Chi-square Tests
 Unit 14: Regression Revisited
Unit 15: Experimental Design Revisited

Workshops

Materials from each of the workshops is available.

NSF ESIE 0138807