The article that the study takes into consideration is a website by the Australian Bureau of statistics. In the article that was chosen, an official research article that was published for understanding the way consumers use and businesses take advantage of the Australian Bureau of statistics education through using evaluation of the various data that are provided in the website and give these data are indeed usable from the various perspectives of public application (Connelly, 2008).The paper discusses that the availability of statistics has always been difficult especially for educational institutions industrially and even in institutions around the world. In fact, such opinion is or also supported by other literature on the topic of the application of statistics to education with respect to the actual access of students.
An article was published concerning a discussion on the importance of statistics in mass education in other countries and that statistical education in order to be truly cutting edge and take advantage of the most recent data that has been gathered by other statistical institutions must also be available in websites and freely distributed on the Internet (Ridgway, Nicholson, & McCusker, 2008).However, other researchers have also pointed out the fact that especially in the availability of statistics in websites, it is very difficult for statisticians who have been used to traditional data gathering processes to adapt and make use of such new technology (Poelmans, Wessa, Milis, Bloemen, & Doom, 2008).Therefore, in this specific article, researchers wanted to assess the various ways the consumers of the website -- usually education teachers and mathematics teachers that deliver lessons in statistics to students -- of the industrially in government to see whether or not the current operations of the website is effective or whether there is avenue for improvements. The article points out, together with other research concerning the topic, that website design plays one of the key roles in the acceptability and usability of a website that is driven by data (Harper, 2008).However, at least from the point of view of acceptability, data-driven websites must first and foremost be able to provide data and information to its users while at the same time striking inessential balance of design and consumer ease-of-use.
In Australia, statistical education plays a foremost role in the various academic institutions and universities in the country because of the large use of statisticians by the government, private companies, and even to other educational courses which consider statistics as one of its main foundation for further research.Either through applications in actual formal educational statistics (Leigh & Ryan, 2008), participation in other vocational activities (Walstab, Lamb, & Learning, 2008), or even after education employment which require data gathering and analysis of such data (Richardson, Liu, & (Australia, 2008), a centralized system is required in order for the country to take advantage of current trends in statistical education.In a study that this paper has chosen to summarize, researchers have indicated various variables and factors to consider in evaluating the website where centralized statistical data both from the government and other academic institutions are found. In order to be able to do this, the researchers had made use of a multiple regression analysis to the other indicating the various variables which indicates usability and accessibility of the sample and targeted population.Multiple regression analysis is often used in many other statistical studies especially in evaluating very action of consumers and other users to certain inputs and the researchers have indicated that this was the best tool that should be used (Preacher & Hayes, 2008).As the results and discussion point out, the website has been designed to be unnecessarily complex especially from teachers that make use of the website for delivering mathematics education in elementary and secondary levels.
As a result, the recommendation of the study was to simplify the design of the website for the statistics to be highly available and easily understood by its most important audience which are the educators of mathematics and statistics.
