Abstract #300092

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JSM 2003 Abstract #300092
Activity Number: 132
Type: Contributed
Date/Time: Monday, August 4, 2003 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
Sponsor: Section on Statistical Education
Abstract - #300092
Title: Guided Self-Explanation
Author(s): Nick Broers*+ and Martijn P. F. Berger
Companies: Maastricht University and University of Maastricht
Address: PO Box 616, Maastricht, 6200 MD, Netherlands
Keywords: self-explanation ; concept maps ; knowledge networks
Abstract:

Statistics is known to be a difficult subject to many students with a nonmathematical background. In our experience as teachers, we have found that one of the reasons for this difficulty is that statistical theories are fraught with highly abstract concepts that have to be interlinked into an integrated knowledge network in order to be properly understood. To many students, this poses a daunting task that requires special teaching assistance. We followed a special group of students who had repeatedly failed an exam on elementary statistical inference and asked them to provide insight into their knowledge network by constructing a concept map. On the basis of these concept maps, we analyzed which concepts and links between concepts were frequently missing and constructed a program aimed at directing the attention of the students to the missing links. This program provided specialized tasks that were developed to help the students explain these missing links to themselves. We will discuss the potential of the method used and consider whether it would be worth adopting as a general didactic approach.

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