| المستخلص: |
Increasing emphasis is being placed on statistical skills and knowledge in the Palestinian curricula within the mathematics curriculum at all school levels in Palestine to establish a knowledge society. Furthermore, the application of information and communication technology (ICT) in statistics education has provided the opportunity for delivering good quality statistical education. The subject of discussion in this paper is to examine to what extent is the quality of statistics education assured, and whether continuous improvement in its quality is being planned and implemented for students in various disciplines at the Palestinian universities. The aim of this paper is to examine the quality of statistics education to non-statistics students, and to propose a new framework for quality education in statistics that can be applied to Palestinian students. Challenges in statistics education in different countries, as well as the potential for their development using new available technology are discussed. Statistics educators face major challenges in teaching statistics courses for non-specialists not only in Palestine, but all over the world, where they face common challenges. Besides, most Palestinian universities suffer from poor student/teacher ratios, large class sizes, and inadequate computing facilities, particularly for students in social sciences, education and business-related fields. Nevertheless, the majority of students spend much of their time outside the campus for using computers and going online. Much statistical software is accessible by Palestinian students, such as SPSS, Minitab, Excel and R. The major challenges that are faced by statistics educators all over the world are discussed here, and their statistical significance on Palestinian students is examined. The main proposal in this paper is that statistics curricula should be revised and computer oriented, with assignments using real datasets, and case studies related to the students own fields, and from the local Palestinian culture. The paper also stresses the need for preparing textbooks that illustrates the statistical methodology, as well as software description with many case studies and real datasets.
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