The Data to Decision Project: An experiential approach to teaching undergraduate business statistics

Abstract

Teaching statistics to undergraduate business students is an enduring challenge, often due to student apprehension and low understanding of relevance. The Data to Decision Project is an approach designed to address this challenge. At the onset of an introductory statistics course, fifty-two students received instruction on the Define, Collect, Organize, Visualize and Analyze (DCOVA) framework to integrate data with business-related decision-making. Concurrent with this instruction, students selected and completed individual projects, using the DCOVA framework to explore their individual decisions. Quantitative and qualitative methods indicated that this approach positively impacted the students’ ability to apply statistics, as well as their attitudes regarding their statistics abilities.

Keywords:

• Teaching business statistics
• active learning
• experiential learning
• project
• based learning
• student-selected
• student-centric
• DCOVA
• decision-making

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to share.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available upon request from the corresponding author.