This paper is from Session 10F: Statistics education in South America
which comes under Topic 10: An international perspective on statistics education
(Friday 16th, 14:00-16:00)
Different views of a basic statistics course
Presenter
Abstract
This paper aims at reporting the results of a project that evaluated a basic statistics course offered by the University of São Paulo to undergraduate students of different careers. We collected, through interviews, teachers’ and (under)graduate monitors’ opinions and visited the classrooms to observe the dynamics and the relationships between teachers and students. Also, students answered, voluntarily and anonymously, an evaluation questionnaire about the course and, three months after the course had finished, a test to measure the statistics basic knowledge learned was applied. These different methodological tools are important for a critical comprehension of what is going on with the course and to guide future changes. The results indicated that the students have unfavorable opinion about this basic statistics course, while the majority of teachers liked the way it was organized. Furthermore, the statistical test revealed poor performance of students who had been previously approved in the course.
