Its all about you

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Its all about you

• Making statistics relevant to students

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Statistics is the science of data

• Data used to teach should be real to
• Motivate
• Engage
• Show Statistics as relevant to every-day life
• The key is to interest students

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Two Approaches

• Student gathered data (projects)
• Previously collected data from real studies
  (often cleaned up a bit)

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Making Real Data Useful

• Bryce, Hoerl, Snee (BTF VII
• data should be useful to students
• (See http//www.icepick.com and Roberts, Seth,
  "Surprises From Self-Experimentation, Sleep,
  Mood, and Weight. Chance, v14, n2, 2001 for
  examples of ubiquitious and/or self-centered
  data.)

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Some student-centric approaches

• Bryce, et. al. continuous improvement model
  teaches students to think of every day activities
  as statistical processes that can be improved by
  identifying and controlling sources of variation.
• Projects given general guidelines to collect
  data, students will often, on their own, find
  data that is interesting

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Student-centric data

• The in-class survey. In addition to providing
  nice examples, students can learn about their
  class.
• Data in every-day life. Fathom guide points
  out that the mp3 player exports data about music
  library. Can monitor budget, exercise, etc.

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Self-assessment

• What about self-help questionnaires that, at
  least in theory, tell us about ourselves?
• Mahtash Esfandiari, UCLA, used a Conflict
  Resolution questionnaire in a freshman seminar to
  show how statistics can be used to teach us about
  ourselves

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Teaching Statistics Assessment

• Gives us insight into our own attitudes towards
  teaching Statistics (?)
• Provokes conversation about how to teach
  Statistics
• Illustrates a variety of statistical concepts

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Directions

• Answer with first instinct
• Do you agree? 1 is Not At All. 5 is Very
  Much.
• Place answer in first blank
• Reverse appropriate scores in 2nd blank,
  carry over others into 2nd blank
• Compute Totals

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Distributions

• Plot scores on constructs
• Predict shapes
• Which should be closest to normally distributed?
• Does it matter how many people we have plotting?
• What does spread tell us? Center?

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UCLA Scores
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Outlier removed
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Single linkage
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Complete
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average
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References

• Roberts, Seth, "Surprises From Self-Experimentatio
  n, Sleep, Mood, and Weight. Chance, v14, n2,
  2001.
• G. Rex Bryce, Roger Hoerl, Ronald Snee, "A
  Statistical Thinking Approach to Introductory
  Statistics Theory and Practice.
  http//web.monroecc.edu/beyond/archive
• www.icepick.com
• Data Are Everywhere Projects for Fathom, Finzer,
  Key Curriculum Press.