Current challenges in statistics: large-lecture courses

Abstract

Each semester approximately 80% of the students taught by the Florida State University Department of Statistics are enrolled in STA 3014: Fundamental Business Statistics. During the academic year this course is taught in large lecture sections of 250 students each. It is either the only statistics course or one of two statistics courses taken in their undergraduate career for probably 90% of these students. A similar situation exists in many statistics departments around the nation.

These large introductory courses offer us the opportunity to introduce the power of statistics to a large fraction of our future business leaders. In the past it appears that this opportunity has often been missed. In fact, some suggest that these courses help contribute to the general public's negative attitude toward statistics courses, the discipline of statistics, and statisticians.

Hence, I propose that one of the current challenges in statistics is the challenge of improving the quality of these courses so that statistics may contribute to the improvement of quality and productivity in the United States, a vital national issue. In this paper I report on my experiences in grappling with this challenge in STA 3014.

Keywords:

• quality improvement
• commitment
• one team
• barriers
• term project
• video taping