Integrating Ethics with the Teaching of Introductory Statistics: Rationale and Resources

• Activity Number: 55
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Sunday, August 4, 2013 : 4:00 PM to 5:50 PM
• Sponsor: Committee on Professional Ethics
• Author(s): Lawrence M. Lesser*+
• Companies: The University of Texas at El Paso
• Keywords: ethics ; interdisciplinary ; equity ; professional ethics ; philosophy ; teaching

Abstract

Professional codes and mission statements proclaim the importance of ethical statistical practice and serving the public welfare, but it is also worth examining their connections to philosophical ethics as well as how concepts of ethics can motivate and facilitate students' engagement with standard statistics topics (e.g., expected value, distributions, data collection from human subjects). This paper is informed by my recent work: the two-way exchange between statistics and applied ethics in an undergraduate interdisciplinary 3-week ethics module I created for a comprehensive masters university (my paper in Journal of Statistics Education, 12(3)), integration of related themes into a full-semester introductory statistics course taken mainly by future elementary and middle school teachers at a research intensive university (my papers in 2005 and 2008 JSM Proceedings), reflections on the ASA's ethical guidelines (my letter in The American Statistician, 66(4)), and my 2008 paper presented at the Technion. Connections may also be possible with distributive ethics (my paper in JSE, 15(1)) or with diversity and equity issues that have ethical implications (my ICOTS8 Proceedings paper).