Contributing Author

Digging into Data Science using the Garden Dataset

Posted on December 1, 2021December 1, 2021 by Contributing Author

Contributing author Lisa Lendway has been teaching statistics and data science at Macalester College for the past 4 1/2 years. Before returning to Macalester College (she’s an alum!), Lisa worked as a statistician/data scientist in a variety of industries including retail, healthcare, and insurance. She strives to stay at the forefront of new R technology and to teach her students those skills so they can thrive in the workforce or graduate school. When not nerding out about R, you can probably find Lisa biking with her spouse, spending time with her 9 & 11 year old kids, or tending her large urban garden.

In the summer of 2020, I decided it was time to collect some data from my garden. I did this for two reasons:

I was curious about how much food I produced.
I wanted to use the data in my Introductory Data Science course at Macalester College.

I knew the data would be fairly simple, and I liked that it would be a bit personal and give a way for me to connect with students. Although I didn’t know it when I started collecting the data, the personal aspect ended up being especially important during the 2020-21 school year when I was teaching remotely.

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Promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Statistics Classroom

Posted on November 9, 2021November 9, 2021 by Contributing Author

Contributing author Heather Barker is a lecturer of Mathematics and Statistics in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. She teaches statistics courses as well as courses for mathematics education students. Her research interests lie in statistics education, text mining, and diversity/equity/inclusion pedagogy.

Contributing author Kirsten Doehler is an Associate Professor of Statistics in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Elon University. Her research interests include statistics education, survival analysis, and diversity/equity/inclusion. For more information, visit her faculty page.

Many colleges and universities have made a strong effort to make their campuses more inclusive to all people, especially those from underrepresented and historically marginalized minority groups. These efforts include faculty incorporating instruction that focuses on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) issues in their classroom. Statistics instructors have a unique opportunity to engage students in work around DEI considering there is an abundance of data available today to explore these issues. In this blog post, we share some of the data sets and activities we have used in our undergraduate introductory statistics classes to engage students in conversations around big issues that persist in marginalized groups.

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“You mean we have to write in this class!?”

Posted on September 2, 2021September 2, 2021 by Contributing Author

Contributing author Nicole Dalzell is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Statistics at Wake Forest University.

I often hear variations of this statement at the beginning of each semester. Writing is not something students tend to associate with statistics, nor is it something that most stats faculty members have been formally trained to teach. However, the ability to create and critique written communication involving data and statistics is becoming increasingly important. Students who will be using statistics and data in future careers need to be able to communicate their results and processes to get a job. Other students read statements involving statistics on social media or news sources, and then must decide whether that information is correct or reliable. In this post, I will share an activity that can be used to begin to teach statistical writing.

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Ooh, Shiny!: R Shiny apps as a teaching tool

Posted on August 17, 2021August 17, 2021 by Contributing Author

Contributing author Dan Adrian is an Associate Professor of Statistics at Grand Valley State University.

Interactive web applications (or apps), such as the Rossman-Chance collection, are popular tools for teaching statistics because they help illustrate fundamental concepts such as randomness, sampling, and variability through dynamic visualizations. The StatKey collection of apps created for the Lock5 textbook series to demonstrate and perform simulation-based inference is another example¹. Historically, despite the utility of the web apps and the ease of their use, it was difficult for most stat educators to create or modify them because of the requisite coding knowledge in HTML, CSS, and Java/Javascript. Thankfully, RStudio created the R package {shiny}, which allows web apps (i.e., Shiny apps) to be created using R code alone, and the HTML/CSS/Javascript work is done by the package “behind the scenes”.

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Making Awesome Tables and Figures Using Gestalt Principles

Posted on July 8, 2021July 9, 2021 by Contributing Author

Contributing author Silas Bergen is an associate professor of statistics and data science at Winona State University.

It was late October in Minnesota, a perfect time for a swim in a local lake! At least, so thought a biology professor at our university (I’ll call him Dr. Doe). This chilly excursion dislodged an idea in his mind: what is the relationship between the body temperature recovery at different areas of the body and water temperature? Dr. Doe collected data from six hard-core swimmers and asked me if my students in the statistical consulting class could help him answer his question “Sure”, I said.

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Specifications-Grading: An Example

Posted on March 25, 2021 by Contributing Author

Contributing author Eric Reyes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and has been tinkering with specifications grading in his statistics courses for the past five years.

Sometimes Specifications-Grading (Nilson, 2015) can feel like cooking – I may have all the ingredients, but it doesn’t mean I can turn it into an edible product. Bouncing ideas off other colleagues has been extremely beneficial. In this post, I will discuss an implementation I used for an intermediate statistics course.

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Specifications-Grading: An Overview

Posted on February 4, 2021 by Contributing Author

Motivation

What is the least enjoyable part about being a professor? For me, the answer is easily “grading.” For years I dreaded the whole process – determining whether a response was worth 4 points or 5, ensuring consistency across students, and arguing over partial credit instead of discussing course content. Opposite this dread was the knowledge that one of the most important roles we have as educators is providing feedback to students. Since reading Nilson’s (2015) book on Specifications-Grading, I have implemented some variation of the system in all my courses. While I don’t suddenly love grading, I have been convinced this is a better approach; I spend less time grading; and the quality of the student work has improved! In this post, we’ll discuss the key components of Specifications-Grading; in a follow-up post, we’ll discuss an implementation for an intermediate statistics course.

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Slack for (A)synchronous Course Communication

Posted on May 29, 2020January 28, 2021 by Contributing Author

Contributing author Albert Y. Kim is an assistant professor of statistical & data sciences. He is a co-author of the fivethirtyeight R package and ModernDive, an online textbook for introductory data science and statistics. His research interests include spatial epidemiology and model assessment and selection methods for forest ecology. Previously, Albert worked in the Search Ads Metrics Team at Google Inc. as well as at Reed, Middlebury and Amherst colleges. You can follow him on Twitter @rudeboybert.

Contributing author R. Jordan Crouser is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Smith College. He is published in the areas of visualization theory, human-computer interaction, educational technology, visual analytics systems and human computation. For more information, visit his faculty page.

Contributing author Benjamin S. Baumer is an assistant professor in the Statistical & Data Sciences program at Smith College. His research interests include sports analytics, data science, statistics and data science education, statistical computing, and network science. For more information, visit his faculty page.

You might have heard of Slack before. But what is it? Is it email? Is it a chat room? Slack describes their flagship product as a “collaboration hub that can replace email to help you and your team work together seamlessly.” In this blogpost, we’ll describe how we’ve been using Slack for asynchronous course communication, as opposed to the synchronous course communications afforded by Zoom and other remote conferencing platforms.

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Teaching Programming vs. Training Programmers: Where the Means Justify the Means

Posted on May 7, 2020January 28, 2021 by Contributing Author

Contributing author Jonathan Duggins is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at North Carolina State University.

Introduction

Most of us statistics (and data science!) educators understand that knowing how to use statistical software is integral to student successes, both in their coursework and in their careers, for our statistics and data science majors. However, in many degree programs, software usage is seen as a means to an end – getting an analysis – rather than an end goal in its own right. How did this come about, why does it matter, and what can we do to change our software-related instruction? These are the questions I discuss below, first by looking at some history of programming in these contexts, then by presenting two current philosophies on how to incorporate programming.

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Adapting Statistics Instruction for an Online Environment in the Wake of COVID-19

Posted on March 20, 2020January 28, 2021 by Contributing Author

Contributing author Christopher Engledowl is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education and Quantitative Research Methods at New Mexico State University.

The world is currently experiencing unprecedented forced movement from face-to-face interaction to a completely virtual form of interaction. Higher education institutions have quickly made sweeping policy decisions that have, overnight, overhauled the classroom learning environment. These decisions have resulted in many people questioning the kinds of quality that can be expected—especially from instructors who have never taught an online course. Simultaneously, many organizations have expanded the capacity of their digital platforms to accommodate the insurgence of people making use of their products for teaching and learning.

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