189 – Contributed Poster Presentations: Section on Statistical Education
Development and Implementation of WISE (Workshop to Inspire Statistical Excellence) to Recruit Future Statisticians
Michelle L. DePoy Smith
Eastern Kentucky University
Amanda Ellis
Eastern Kentucky University
Shane P. Redmond
Eastern Kentucky University
Faculty at Eastern Kentucky University hosted a one-day workshop in April for current high school students who were enrolled in an advanced placement statistics course. The pilot program consisted of 53 students from two local high schools to participate in the day-long activities. The goals of the workshop were to use group learning and competition to 1) prepare students for an end of course exam, 2) perform data analysis and exploration, and 3) recruit top high school students to major in mathematics and/or statistics. Two sessions consisted of using active learning to cover sampling distributions and one-sample hypothesis tests. Two additional sessions consisted of reviewing and mock exam questions for two-sample inference and regression. Prizes were given to the students with the best solutions for each session and overall best solutions. In addition, faculty and current undergraduate students discussed careers and opportunities in statistics. We hope to expand this workshop to all the high schools within the Eastern Kentucky University service region next year and other surrounding counties. Also, we hope that this workshop will serve as a model for a future high school calculus workshop. The goals of this paper are to present the workshop curriculum, follow-up survey results, and lessons learned from the workshop.