This article describes a collaborative project across three institutions to develop, implement, and evaluate a series of tutorials and case studies that highlight fundamental tools of data science--such as visualization, data manipulation, and database usage--that instructors at a wide-range of institutions can incorporate into existing statistics…

Increasingly students, particularly those in the social sciences, work with survey data collected through a more complex sampling method than a simple random sample. Failing to understand how to properly approach survey data can lead to inaccurate results. In this article, we describe a series of online data visualization applications and…

James J. Cochran is Professor of Applied Statistics, Rogers-Spivey Faculty Fellow, and Associate Dean for Research in the Culverhouse College of Commerce at the University of Alabama. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and of Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences. He is also a recipient of the INFORMS Prize…

Estimating the efficacy of different instructional modalities, techniques, and interventions is challenging because teaching style covaries with instructor, and the typical student only takes a course once. We introduce the individualized treatment effect (ITE) from analyses of personalized medicine as a means to quantify individual student…

Statistics courses that focus on data analysis in isolation, discounting the scientific inquiry process, may not motivate students to learn the subject. By involving students in other steps of the inquiry process, such as generating hypotheses and data, students may become more interested and vested in the analysis step. Additionally, such an…

Undergraduate students who have just completed an introductory statistics course often lack deep understanding of variability and enthusiasm for the field of statistics. This paper argues that by introducing the commonly underemphasized concept of measurement error, students will have a better chance of attaining both. We further present lecture…

In this paper, we describe an in-class experiment that is easy to implement with large groups of students. The experiment takes approximately 15-20 minutes to run and involves each student completing one of four types of Sudoku puzzles and recording the time it takes to completion. The resulting data set can be used as a teaching tool at an…

Nearly all introductory statistics textbooks include a chapter on data collection methods that includes a detailed discussion of both random sampling methods and randomized experiments. But when statistical inference is introduced in subsequent chapters, its justification is nearly always based on principles of random sampling methods. From the…

Researchers and statistics educators consistently suggest that students will learn statistics more effectively by conducting projects through which they actively engage in a broad spectrum of tasks integral to statistical inquiry, in the authentic context of a real-world application. In keeping with these findings, we share an implementation of…

Students often enter an introductory statistics class with less than positive attitudes about the subject. They tend to believe statistics is difficult and irrelevant to their lives. Observational evidence from previous studies suggests including projects in a statistics course may enhance students' attitudes toward statistics. This study examines…

Technology is increasingly used to aid the teaching of statistics. Personal Response Systems (PRS) involve equipping students with a handset allowing them to send responses to questions put to them by a lecturer. PRS allows lectures to be more interactive and can help reinforce material. It can also allow the lecturer to monitor students'…

In this paper we describe an interactive activity that illustrates simple linear regression. Students collect data and analyze it using simple linear regression techniques taught in an introductory applied statistics course. The activity is extended to illustrate checks for regression assumptions and regression diagnostics taught in an…

Statistical thinking is required for good statistical analysis. Among other things, statistical thinking involves identifying sources of variation. Students in introductory statistics courses seldom recognize that one of the largest sources of variation may come in the collection and recording of the data. This paper presents some simple exercises…

This article describes an innovative curriculum module the first author created on the two-way exchange between statistics and applied ethics. The module, having no particular mathematical prerequisites beyond high school algebra, is part of an undergraduate interdisciplinary ethics course which begins with a 3-week introduction to basic applied…