Nonspecialist Graduate Students' Experience of Statistics Courses: From Students' Voices

• Activity Number: 193
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, July 30, 2012 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Education
• Author(s): Monica Dabos*+
• Companies: University of California at Santa Barbara
• Keywords: Statistics ; Education

Abstract

Statistics education researchers are currently engaged in identifying the gaps in statistical understanding held by students and teachers alike and are actively involved in improving the teaching and learning of statistics. For the most part, research has been focused on elementary and secondary education from the perspective of both students and teachers. Research has begun to emerge about students and instructors at the two-year college level which suggests that difficulties in learning and teaching statistics prevail at that level of education too. However, a population of students overlooked by researchers are graduates specializing in fields others than statistics. Most graduate students are required to take statistics courses as part of their masters or doctoral degrees. While the main purpose of such courses is to encourage graduate students to properly utilize statistics for their own dissertations, their experience leads many to frustration, discouragement and the idea that statistics is anything, but practical. It is my belief that it is up to statistics education researchers and educators to help improve the experience non-specialist graduate students have with statistic