This paper is from Session 10A: Collaboration between industries/international-connections and university-level education:
which comes under Topic 10: Organisations and collaboration in statistics education
Paper 10A1 (Tuesday 10th, 11:00-12:30)
Statistics in Practice: Making of Professional Statisticians in a Classroom
Presenter
- Dilhari Attygalle (University of Colombo, Sri Lanka)
Co-author
- Asoka Ramanayake (University of Colombo, Sri Lanka)
Abstract
This paper discusses our classroom experience in teaching “Statistics in Practice” – a third year course conducted during a 15-week semester, where students learn actively by changing their role to be a reporter, a data integrator, a statistician, and a statistical consultant. As required for the course, the students prepared a newspaper article on the issue of graduate employability based on census data; they collated and prepared complicated data sets to be ready for analysis; they were consultants to a client solving their business problem related to lower revenues in retail sales; they helped conduct a large survey for the education sector. This novel learning approach created an elevated student centered learning environment that paved the way for them to become professional statisticians.