Making an Impact on Undergraduates Through Experiential Learning in Statistics

• Activity Number: 189 - Contributed Poster Presentations: Section on Statistical Education
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, July 29, 2019 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics and Data Science Education
• Author(s): Tracy Morris* and Tyler Cook and Cynthia Murray
• Companies: University of Central Oklahoma and University of Central Oklahoma and University of Central Oklahoma
• Keywords: consulting; undergraduate; transformative learning; experiential learning

Abstract

Dale Carnegie, in his famous book, How to Win Friends and Influence People said, “Learning is an active process. We learn by doing. … Only knowledge that is used sticks in your mind.” Students can listen to lectures on statistics, work problems from textbooks, and excel on exams, but they don’t truly LEARN statistics until they DO statistics. At the University of Central Oklahoma (UCO), undergraduate students actively DO statistics through an extracurricular student statistical consulting group called SCHOLAR (Statistical Consulting Help for Organization Leaders and Academic Researchers). SCHOLAR students meet with their clients to develop research questions, collect and organize any necessary data, analyze the data, and prepare final reports for the clients. In 2016, UCO was awarded an NSF IUSE grant to study the impacts of SCHOLAR on both students and clients. In this presentation we will detail student outcomes, including presentations, attitudes toward graduate school, attitudes toward statistics, and confidence in research abilities. These outcomes among SCHOLAR students will be compared to those of a control group of students who have not participated in SCHOLAR.