Keeping it Real, Keeping Them Interested and Keeping it in Their Minds

Abstract

As part of many universities' Business degrees, students will undertake an introductory statistics course. Lecturers need to help these students appreciate and recognise the value of possessing quantitative skills and to learn and apply such skills. Three components to teaching that address these aims as well as the interdependence of these components as part of a process which enhances the teaching environment and student outcomes are described. Methods and examples to perform the techniques and ideas are provided along with a discussion of their implementation and effectiveness after delivery in a large first year course.

• Teaching introductory statistics
• Pedagogy
• Increasing student confidence
• Improved learning methods
• Teaching materials

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editor and an associate editor for helpful comments on the first draft.

Notes

1 “Active learning is concerned with … how (students) gain insight into main ideas, technical details, and intuition. It is contrasted to passive learning in which information is presented to students who are expected to absorb it through contemplation and memorization of notes and textbook material. Students can learn actively by working problems for themselves, thinking about concepts to form their own summaries and statements…” (Bryce 2005)

2 In the lecture it is useful to simply identify the lowest and highest values along the number line and place the crosses between them to ensure students are not being distracted by numbers. An interactive hand-drawn sketch in colour pen on an overhead transparency can aid the presentation, reducing the rigidity that may be felt if Figure 1 was typed up and pre-prepared for display in the class.

3 It must be mentioned that students are exposing themselves, and leaving themselves vulnerable, if they are expected to hold their hand up clearly in the air in support of an answer. This can reduce a student's willingness to participate and reduces the lecturer's chance of assessing their understanding. Accordingly, students should be asked to place their fist against their chest and raise their fore-finger in support so at least it can be seen by the lecturer if they are firstly thinking and secondly choosing correctly. This reduces students' concerns of being seen as ignorant by their peers; I've successfully used this in lecture theatres seating some 160 students.

4 For brevity the interaction with the students on how to undertake such research (including sampling instead of a census) has been excluded, however, this is another valuable part of the scenario as students can participate.

5 Students are reminded that the lecturer is not saying they are wrong but merely wanting to ensure that the class' perspective is clearly stated, not accidentally misrepresented. It is vitally important that the lecturer slowly restates the class' response and verifies that this is what they have decided before progressing, not something that the lecturer is deciding! Words such as “is that what you are telling me, I don't want to be putting words in your mouths” and “I'm not suggesting you are wrong, I just don't want to be putting words in your mouths” should be used before progressing at each stage.

6 Passive learning involves the presentation of information “…to students who are expected to absorb it through contemplation and memorization of notes and textbook material.” (Bryce 2005)

7 This may alternatively be stated as ‘if was a long way away from 10’

8 It was deliberately decided to describe this from the perspective of rejecting or not rejecting at a significance level, rather than going straight to the p-value representing a level of strength of evidence against the null hypothesis. Although many may suggest that the significance level is often somewhat arbitrary, the concept of not making a definite decision but instead leaving it as ‘strength of evidence’ alone can leave students unsatisfied; the latter can be taught after they firstly learn the significance level approach.

9 This scenario could easily be presented as either a one- or two-tailed test. The two-tailed scenario would identify management's competing concerns that if the time taken is considerably (i) less than 10 minutes then they are overpaying the contractors for their time, and (ii) more than 10 minutes other processes (including the availability of the room to arriving guests) are delayed.

10 Neither the textbook's coauthor nor I was the course coordinator in Sem 1, 2005.