Statistics: What's the Difference? An Introductory Statistics Course

• Activity Number: 109
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Monday, August 1, 2011 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: IMS
• Author(s): Vincent Dorie*+ and Andrew Gelman and Valerie Chan
• Companies: Columbia University and Columbia University and Columbia University
• Keywords: introductory ; education ; R ; active learning

Abstract

In our experience, we have found wide-spread dissatisfaction with the content of traditional introductory statistics courses: students often build intuition separate from mathematical skills, complicating evaluation; unlike in physics or calculus, there is no natural progression to the topics; and many of our students come from non-technical fields, viewing the course as an interruption to their studies. From the educator's perspective, much time is spent preparing and executing the class which leaves little room to develop a cohesive framework.

To address this, we have developed an introductory course that includes, freely available: minute-by-minute class schedules and slides; an electronic textbook; homework and example problems; an R package and sample code; and a test-bank of exam questions. Class time incorporates elements from the forefront of education research such as active learning, Peer Instruction (Mazur, 1997), and Just-in-Time-Teaching (Novak, 1999). In addition, we have reorganized and redefined the course content into a form that we believe increases coherence and relevance. Finally, we have implemented our program in classes containing over 100 students.