International Journal of
Information and Education Technology

Abstract—The underlying philosophy of statistical software primarily aims to empower data analysts to concentrate on statistical thinking and leave the computational burden to computers. Teaching how to program statistical software, however, is over-emphasized by some lecturers and students may not develop the skills needed to be competent at justifying and/or interpreting statistical results. For this reason, this article aims to address this issue by developing a model of teaching statistical software to strengthen secondary and tertiary students’ capacity to understand statistical processes and conduct statistical investigations. The model consists of six major steps: examining data characteristics, selecting statistical tools, understanding the strengths and weaknesses of statistical software, checking the accuracy of statistical output, interpreting statistical output and presenting statistical results.

Index Terms—Semantic error, statistical context, statistical logic, statistical investigation.

Ken W. Li is with the Department of Information and Communications Technology, Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education (Tsing Yi), 20 Tsing Yi Road, New Territories, Hong Kong (e-mail: kenli@vtc.edu.hk).

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Cite: Ken W. Li, "A Model of Teaching Statistical Computing," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 143-147, 2016.