Teaching a Second Statistics Course for QBIC: A Special Program at Florida International University

• Activity Number: 79
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Sunday, August 1, 2010 : 4:00 PM to 5:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Education
• Author(s): Ramon Gomez*+
• Companies: Florida International University
• Keywords: Statistics Education ; Technology ; SPSS ; PowerPoint

Abstract

A special undergraduate program for selected biology majors was recently inaugurated at Florida International University. The program, identified as QBIC, emphasizes the use of mathematics and statistics for analyses of biological/biomedical data and includes two statistics courses during the sophomore year. This paper reports on the use of technology when teaching the second statistics course. Two technology resources were integrated in our course: the daily use of PowerPoint for lectures as well as SPSS for data computations and analyses. Each student had access to a desktop personal computer during classes and real data from the current sciences research field were analyzed. The discussion included in this paper suggests that the addition of these technology resources and the use of real data provided a very effective teaching-learning model for a second statistics course at college.