#ActiveLearning – StatTLC

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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Contributing author Catherine Case is a lecturer at the University of Georgia and the lesson plan editor for Statistics Teacher.

This post is really inspired by a plenary talk given by Jim Stigler at USCOTS 2015. He’s a psychologist at UCLA, and in his USCOTS talk, he emphasized the idea of productive struggle. He talked about different teaching cultures around the world, and how American classrooms often feature “quick and snappy” lessons as opposed to “slow and sticky” lessons, despite the fact that making the process of learning harder can actually lead to deeper, longer-lasting understanding.

His ideas really challenged me, because I often teach fairly large classes (120 – 140 students per section), and nowhere is “quick and snappy” more highly valued than in a large lecture. There’s definitely tension in large classes between efficiency and productive struggle.

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Tag: #ActiveLearning

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

How Do We Encourage “Productive Struggle” in Large Classes?