Teaching Statistics in Integration with Psychology

Abstract

The aim was to revise a statistics course in order to get the students motivated to learn statistics and to integrate statistics more throughout a psychology course. Further, we wish to make students become more interested in statistics and to help them see the importance of using statistics in psychology research. To achieve this goal, several changes were made in the course. The theoretical framework to motivate teaching method changes was taken from the statistics education literature together with the ideas of student-centered learning and Kolb's learning circle. One of the changes was to give the students research problems in the beginning of the course that were used throughout the course and which they should be able to solve at the end of the course. Other changes were to create a course webpage and to use more computer-based assignments instead of assignments with calculators. The students' test results and their answers on the Survey of Attitudes Toward Statistics, SATS, (Schau, Stevens, Dauphinee, & Del Vecchio, 1995) together with course evaluations showed that by changing the course structure and the teaching, students performed better, and were more positive towards statistics even though statistics was not their major.

• Student-centered learning
• Research problems
• Course revision