Teaching Students to Read COVID-19 Journal Articles in Statistics Courses

Abstract

Statistics is interdisciplinary and the practical application of statistical methods in various areas prompts undergraduates to learn more about statistics and better understand complex methods. This article presents a classroom teaching design that guides students in reading COVID-19 literature. The activities presented encourage peer-peer and student-instructor interaction, which can be modified based on the type of course offered as well as the level and major of students by changing the articles required for reading. The teaching activities are designed with evidence-based teaching strategies such as scaffolding and connecting the activities to learning outcomes aligned with levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. In our experience, the COVID-19 literature teaching activity improves students’ learning interest, cultivates students’ critical thinking, and enhances students’ understanding of theoretical methods. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Keywords:

• Active learning
• Bloom’s taxonomy
• covid-19
• Jigsaw
• Literature reading
• Statistics courses

Supplementary Materials

In the supplement, we provide the data and code used to produce the analyses in this article. The assessment table can help instructors to give marks to each student in the teaching activity.

Data Availability Statement

The data and the code in this article are available at https://github.com/zjwzajyl/teaching.

Disclosure Statement

The authors declare no potential conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This study is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Reference NO. 71901195) and the Scientific Research Fund of Zhejiang Provincial Education Department (Reference NO. Y202354036).