Dear Ramakrishnan, Thank you for your kind offer.
My hope is that interested professors like yourself would develop some materials on Wikieducator to walk students through the basics of statistical analysis. Eventually there will be enough material on the site so that you could choose a set from Texas (7 specimens came in the post today) and a set from Alaska (I have 6) and use the data for a t-test. I have 10 from the Northeast US and more than that from the West. Alternatively one could choose a series from a range of latitudes to run a regression. Another way to illustrate regression would be to ignore latitude and simply measure length and width from a series of skulls and regress one against the other. It has been my experience that simply providing data to biology students falls flat. They are happier if they collect their own data. In my own course I can bring out 30 skulls and calipers to let them measure. But I suspect that few professors have a box of skulls in their lab...even fewer high school teachers have such a strange resource. That was the basis for the idea. When my students return in September we will photograph more skulls and upload them. This is actually a common research method; scientists usually do this by visiting museum collections; I think the photographic approach is fairly uncommon. I hope I can convince a few teachers or scientists to make measurements from the existing photographs to see how this works. We should be able to get the same measurement for length from the left side and the right side of the same skull. Width should be the same on the top and bottom views. Different teachers should arrive at the same number. Also I want to make sure that the instructions are intelligible. Cheers, Declan -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
