Changing How Students Think About Statistics

• Activity Number: 487
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 12, 2015 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Education
• Author(s): Paul Plummer*
• Companies: University of Central Missouri
• Keywords: Teaching ; Introductory Statistics ; Class Activies ; Lessons

Abstract

Most students entering college think of statistics as being about calculations, pictures and graphs and not much more. For most of them, their experience has focused on the descriptive side of statistics. If you pick up most introductory statistics text books, that idea is reinforced is that most leave statistical inference till the last third of the course. In this presentation I will share my experience with a first week's class project which takes the students from a problem I present them with to finding a potential answer to that question. This problem is then used as a reminder throughout the course that the purpose in all that we do is to solve real problems with information available to us.