An On-Line Workshop Using a Simple Capture-Recapture Experiment to Illustrate the Concepts of a Sampling Distribution

Abstract

We describe a World Wide Web-accessible workshop designed for students in an introductory statistics course that uses a capture-recapture experiment to illustrate the concept of a sampling distribution. In addition to the usual “sampling bowl” experiment, the workshop contains a computer simulation program written in XLISP-STAT that will allow students to further investigate the properties of the estimator.

• Teaching statistics
• Statistics education
• World Wide Web material
• XLISP-STAT.

Acknowledgement

This research was partially funded by the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada. The authors would like to thank the referees for their helpful comments and suggestions.