Abstract:
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In the winter of 2006, I first started using an alternative sequence to teach the applied introductory statistics course at Grand Valley State University along with a few other professors. In the fall of 2015, the entire department began using this sequence after Dr. John Gabrosek and Dr. Paul Stephenson wrote an e-book. The topics in the Introductory Statistics course are divided into seven cases: One Categorical Variable, One Quantitative Variable, Two Categorical Variables, Two Quantitative Variables, Two Independent Samples (compare means), Paired Data, and Three or More Independent Samples (compare means). Each case spirals through four concepts: Data Collection, Descriptive Statistics, Probabilistic Reasoning, and Inferential Statistics. I refer to the sequencing for this course as the consulting approach; when approached with a specific question this approach goes through all the statistical methods needed to answer this question. The sequencing lends itself well to projects and leads to the introduction of confidence intervals and hypothesis testing in the first one-third of the course.
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