Teaching Students How to Assess News Items That Have Statistical Content

• Activity Number: 358
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 6, 2013 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Education
• Author(s): Alan Izenman*+
• Companies: Temple University
• Keywords: Undergraduates ; Temple University ; Quantitative Literacy ; Nontechnical Course ; Use of Statistics ; Critical Essay

Abstract

"Statistics in the News" is an undergraduate course given at Temple University as part of the Quantitative Literacy portion of the General Education Curriculum. The course has been running since Spring semester 2007 and has attracted students majoring in such departments as Journalism, Broadcasting, Communications, English, History, Music, Art, and various foreign languages. It has since become a graduation requirement for several of those majors. There are currently about four sections given for this course, each containing about 40 students, and demand for a place in the course is very high. This is a nontechnical course that deals with items published in newspapers, magazines, textbooks, scholarly journals, and on the Internet that have a strong statistical content. The course focuses on how to distinguish between informative and misleading uses of statistics, and how to make informed decisions when face with complexity and uncertainty. Course requirements include a critical essay written on a topical subject involving large-scale data collection. This talk will describe the reactions of students to the course and how the course has changed over the years.