Wise: Web Interface for Statistics Education

The Web Interface for Statistics Education (WISE) project includes a World-Wide Web site to support the teaching of introductory social-science statistics courses. The site provides easy access to data bases, archived discussion lists, electronic journals, links to other sites focused on relevant statistics topics, and it includes a prototype of an on-line tutorial. The tutorial, which is the focus of the current paper, is designed to capitalize on special capabilities offered by the Web. The easy linkage between Web pages provides support for a highly interactive tutorial, which uses “failure-based” learning and immediate feedback. Students rated the tutorial as easy to use and indicated that it would have improved their initial statistics course.