Keywords: Pecha Kucha, Statistics Education, Graduate Students
As a statistics instructor, a common issue that professors face is how to engage our students. Many statistics educators recommend using fun/humorous activities (Lesser et al., 2013) as well as interactive presentations (Levasseur & Sawyer, 2006) to enhance student engagement and understanding. One method that is growing in popularity in the higher education classroom is “PechaKucha”(Byrne, 2016; Klentzin et al., 2010). PechaKucha is fast-paced, interactive, and utilizes images to convey information (see pechakucha.org). It consists of 20 images (slides) displayed for 20 seconds each in a six minute and forty second presentation. Research has shown that this type of presentation style can be used successfully by both instructors and students within a college classroom (Byrne, 2016; Levin & Peterson, 2013; Lucas & Rawlins, 2015). Our presentation is focused on using PechaKucha within a graduate-level statistics course. Pairs of students presented an advanced statistics topic (e.g., confirmatory factor analysis). We will discuss how we organized this assignment, what students’ reactions were, and offer suggestions to faculty on how to incorporate this activity within their classroom.