Exploring the Island in an Applied Statistics Course

• Activity Number: 327
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 5, 2014 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Teaching of Statistics in the Health Sciences
• Author(s): Kathy Gray*+
• Companies: California State University, Chico
• Keywords: Island ; Projects ; Data Collection

Abstract

Projects can be a valuable experience for students in a statistics class. Some of the benefits of projects include increased student engagement, collaboration among students, and mastery of statistical techniques learned in class. Previously, I have assigned an end-of-semester poster project requiring students to answer questions of their choosing by means of data collection and analysis. At times, students' projects addressed uninteresting questions or used data that were previously analyzed in another class. Additionally, students needed more experience writing results of data analysis than the project provided. I have replaced the poster project with multiple written reports based on data collected from the Island. Using the Island for data collection forced students to think more critically about experimental design and the questions that they wished to address with their data. They also received more practice using the techniques learned in class. This talk will discuss the experience I had using the Island as a data collection tool in two different applied statistics classes. Feedback from students will be given and suggestions will be made for future use of the Island.