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Teaching of descriptive statistics using simulators and virtual laboratories at university level

Abstract:

INTRODUCTION. One of the main objectives of teachers in mathematics subjects at all educational stages is to be able to maintain the attention of students and keep them motivated to learn. The use of educational technologies, as well as the opportunities they provide, allow them to be considered as a powerful ally. METHOD. This study presents the use of different virtual laboratories and simulators to learn descriptive statistics in the subject of Quantitative Language in the first university course in Ecuador. To carry out the experience, the scores of a pretest and a postest designed to measure the acquisition of the statistical competence have been taken. For this, the means of the control groups have been into account, those that have worked in the usual way and the experimental one, in which the work of examples and exercises has been carried out through the use of virtual laboratories and simulators, and compared using the Student’s t-test for independent groups. RE-SULTS. The comparison of the means obtained by both groups shows that, despite being homoge-neous at the beginning, the differences between the experimental and the control group exceed significantly in 2.7 points. DISCUSSION. The effect size, Cohen’s d, obtained was greater than 1, that is, it is large, which allows us to conclude that the joint use of various simulators and virtual laboratories has been very effective to overcome the learning difficulties found in the study of descriptive statistics in the classroom.