V for Voice: Strategies for Bolstering Communication Skills in Statistics

ABSTRACT

With the ease and automation of data collection and plummeting storage costs, organizations are faced with massive amounts of data that present two pressing challenges: technical analysis of the data themselves and communication of the analytics process and its products. Although a plethora of academic and practitioner literature have focused on the former call, the latter challenge has received less attention. Here, we present strategies that we have found effective for bolstering communication skills of both undergraduate students and masters candidates at a business school. These approaches are based on the case studies that provide ample opportunity for oral communication among students with strong backgrounds in mathematics and introductory statistics, and solid training in written communication among student populations with less homogeneous preparation. We provide detailed discussions motivated by concrete examples executed across three courses.

KEYWORDS:

• Analytics
• Active learning
• ASA guidelines
• Big Data
• Case study
• Entrepreneurship
• Experiential learning
• Predictive modeling
• Public speaking

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Richard Cleary and Xiao-Li Meng for the kind invitation to present at a special session on Big Demand for Big Data during the 2016 Joint Mathematical Meetings held in Seattle, WA. A number of ideas underlying the current work were inspired by and motivated during the venue. In addition, authors thank three anonymous referees for the valuable observations and suggestions during the review of this work.

Supplementary Materials

The supplementary material consists of the appendix of this article, which can be accessed on the publisher's website.