This paper is from Session 3A: Statistics as a service subject in courses
which comes under Topic 3: Statistics education at the post-secondary level Full topic list
(Monday 3rd, 16:00-18:00)
Teaching statistical concepts, fundamentals and modelling
Presenter
Abstract
Over the past several years, statistical educators have been involved in teaching ‘service courses’, where our audiences often come from the social sciences and humanities. As such, it is unlikely that these students will ever become ‘producers’ of statistics – rather, they will be ‘consumers’ or ‘users’ of statistics. Thus, the courses we teach these students should reflect this fact – instead of focusing on calculations and derivations, our courses are becoming much more conceptual. This paper highlights some of the author’s experiences with the transition from ‘number crunching’ to ‘conceptual’ basic statistics courses, focusing on in-class activities, student projects, writing assignments, and using computer packages.
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