EPSY 5271—Becoming a Teacher of Statistics
Offered: fall semesters
Wednesdays, 4:40 – 7:20 p.m.
3 credits
Instructor: Joan Garfield
Professor of Educational Psychology
Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of Statistics
612-625-0337, jbg@umn.ed
Course topics
First courses in statistical science: Introduction to first courses
in statistics: what they are, how they differ in types of students,
course goals, and outcomes.
The research on learning statistics: A summary of research across
the disciplines of psychology, mathematics education, and
statistics, that investigates difficulties students have learning
statistics and why statistical reasoning is so difficult to develop.
Educational reform in statistics: Reports from the
Statistical Association and the Mathematical
Association of America (ASA-MAA) joint
committee, landmark papers on differences between statistics and
mathematics, and new goals for students.
Course content: Examining the content of first courses: how has this
changed in light of changes in the discipline and the practice of
statistics.
The role of technology: Examining multimedia,
Web materials and
resources, simulations tools, and statistical software.
Student assessment: The role of projects, writing, performance
tasks, problems, web based testing, and traditional item formats.
Teaching methods: Focus on active learning, types of activities to
build concepts and reasoning, integrating activities, technology,
and innovative assessment methods.
The importance of data: Learning about where to find good data sets
to use in class, features of good data sets, issues in collecting
and producing data for activities and projects.
Course topics: A focus on teaching particular topics such as:
distributions, measures of center, variability, models, bivariate
data, correlation and regression, probability, sampling, and
different methods of inference.
Innovative projects in statistics: A focus on several innovative,
NSF-funded projects such as The Chance Project, A Data-Oriented,
Active Learning, A Post-Calculus Introduction to Statistical
Concepts, Methods and Theory (SCMT), Activity Based Statistics,
Workshop Statistics, The Statistics Laboratory, Tools for Teaching
and Assessing Statistical Inference, etc.
Focus on Advanced Placement Statistics: Examining the course, the
exam and grading procedures, and the implications for changes in
second courses for these students.
Putting it all together: designing a course, syllabus, choosing a
textbook, activities, student projects, and assessments.
Becoming a member of the statistic education community: Learning
about the different organizations that support statistics education,
the venues for publishing and presenting on statistics education,
etc.
The class format will be one of lecture, discussion, demonstrations
and activities. The class will meet in a computer lab so that
students may explore and experience many of the software and web
tools learned about in class. There will also be student
presentations of various activities, projects, and data sets.
Required text
Moore, T (Ed.) (2001). Teaching Statistics. Mathematics Association
of America, MAA Notes Number 52.
Revised August 2003
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