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Abstract:
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More and more universities are raising their profiles with in-depth courses to engage top students. We present the components of an honors introductory statistics course that called upon students to find reports of statistical applications of interest to them, relate the methods to what they'd recently learned in class, and present their findings in a 15-minute seminar. A sequence of 40 such topics covers all the essentials, from study design to ANOVA, chi-square, and regression. The key to the course's success lies in carefully outlining the parameters of each seminar to reinforce a specific lecture topic, while allowing for unlimited possibilities in the area of application. By tracking down reports about subjects that they care about---politics, sports, or medicine---students proved to themselves that statistics is highly relevant in their personal and academic lives.
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