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... Continue Reading →
Specifications-Grading: An Example
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. Setting up the Hurdles... Continue Reading →
Specifications-Grading: An Overview
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... Continue Reading →
Slack for (A)synchronous Course Communication
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,... Continue Reading →
Teaching Programming vs. Training Programmers: Where the Means Justify the Means
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... Continue Reading →
Adapting Statistics Instruction for an Online Environment in the Wake of COVID-19
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... Continue Reading →