Continuity and Context in Statistics [A]

Statistics textbooks (and courses) generally move from topic to topic without providing a thread linking the subjects into a coherent whole. There is little evidence in the texts that all of these methods and techniques could be used to address questions about a single topic or data set. Professionals use the approach: Here is a task and here are my tools—which of these (maybe all!) can I use to understand what’s going on? I have extended work in a Mathematics Teacher paper (and continued by Mario Triola in several of his texts) investigating gender/age discrimination at the Oscars. Students apply each new method to better understand the data, reflecting on the relative value and strength of graphical, probabilistic and inferential techniques to understand problems and make decisions.