Introduction

In 2003, the American Statistical Association (ASA) funded the Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) Project College Report [33]. This report makes recommendations for the teaching of statistics. Examining the evolution of enrollment in statistics courses, the report notes that statistics courses now serve much larger numbers of students with a more diverse set of backgrounds, goals, interests, and attitudes. Courses are now offered in a wide variety of departments including business, economics, educational psychology, engineering, mathematics, psychology, sociology, and statistics. The content and teaching of statistics courses have also evolved in response to the availability of technology as well as advancements in statistics as a field of study. Building on recommendations put forth in Cobb [19], the GAISE report recommends that statistics education (verbatim from p. 1 of [33]):

1. Emphasize statistical literacy and develop statistical thinking;

2. Use real data;

3. Stress conceptual understanding rather than mere knowledge of procedures;

4. Foster active learning in the classroom;

5. Use technology for developing conceptual understanding and analyzing data;

6. Use assessments to improve and evaluate student learning.

At the same time that the GAISE report was being completed, the authors of this chapter were teaching introductory statistics courses at the University of Oklahoma and had started talking about how useful it would be to have a set of clicker questions for real-time assessment of student understanding.