440 – Contributed Oral Poster Presentations: Section on Teaching of Statistics in the Health Sciences
Efficacy of Computer Tutorials for an Introduction to Statistics Course
David Groh
Good Samaritan College
Kelly Zophy
Gannon University
Tutorials are a form of computer-based instruction that is becoming more popular in higher education. For this study, key issues of student understanding of scientific methodology and student usage of Excel's statistics functions were addressed by writing computer tutorials as PowerPoint macro-enabled shows. A current section of Statistics for Bioscience used the newly developed computer tutorials, while the previous section of the same course used paper-based tutorials that had been developed in earlier years. Comparing learning between the two sections yields a measure of the efficacy of the computer work. This article lists the basic principles used in developing the tutorials and the results of the comparison.