Do Hands-on Activities Increase Student Understanding?: A Case Study

Abstract

This article describes the design, implementation, and assessment of four hands-on activities in an introductory college statistics course. In the activities, students investigated the ideas of the central limit theorem, confidence intervals, and hypothesis testing. Five assessments were administered to the students, one at the beginning and end of the course, and three in between the activities. We found that, despite our attempts to engage our students in active reflection, their performance on the assessments generally did not improve. These results raise important issues about the design of pedagogical tools and activities as well as the need to gather data to assess their effectiveness.

• Hands-On Demonstration
• Active Learning
• Central Limit Theorem
• Confidence Interval
• Hypothesis Testing

Notes

1 Problems that received partial credit of 0.5 are Assessment 1 problem 5a answer d (A1-5a d), A1-5d c, A1-6 d, A1-7 a, A2-1a a, A3-3 c, A3-5 a, A4-3 d, A4-5 a, and A5-3a b, while problems A3-4a, A4-4 c, and A5-2 c received a 0.25 partial credit. In addition, on A1-1 and A5-1 full credit was only given to students who answered b and d, while partial credit was given to those who answered either b or d (but not both).

2 The sampling distributions questions were problem 5 on Assessment 1, problem 1 on Assessment 2, and problem 3 on Assessment 5.

3 delMas, Garfield, and Chance (1999) describe “good reasoning” as “When a student chose a histogram for the larger sample size that was shaped like a normal distribution and that had less variability than the histogram chosen for the smaller sample size.” They describe “larger to smaller reasoning” as when “students chose a histogram with less variability for the larger sample size.”

4 The results of the statistical tests can be found in Appendix C.