This semester I am teaching a short term Intro Stats class, and I have found it more challenging to flip this class. The class meets 4 days a week for 2 hours a day. This can be difficult because I typically have two main concepts to cover, and students have trouble preparing for a second topic until they get a chance to work on the first concept in class. I will share some of the strategies I have used. The…
Had a great time at ICTCM 2017 in Chicago. And I learned a lot. Between Maria Andersen’s opening day keynote and Eric Mazur’s Saturday sessions I feel that I am making good progress in some areas, but there is still room for improvement. My “lecture time” is very active and engaging, but I feel like I need to turn it up a bit and allow my students more time to experiment and discover. I need to use assessment FOR learning. …
This Saturday I will be speaking at ICTCM about how I use Learning Catalytics in my Statistics and Algebra courses. Collecting Homework I started slowly in my Statistics courses, using Learning Catalytics to collect “written” homework. I often give written assignments to supplement MyStatLab exercises, and Learning Catalytics allows me to collect certain problems or parts of certain problems. The answers are automatically graded and scores are transferred to my grade book in MyStatLab. This strategy encourages students to do…
Last semester I flipped my Statistics classroom, and was really happy with the results. I have put together some pages explaining exactly how I flipped the classroom, with links/descriptions of documents that I used along with a calendar showing how I we covered the material. You can find it all at http://georgewoodbury.com/flip I will be adding more to the site as I make my way through a second semester of flipping that classroom – this time in a short-term (8…
I have had a few questions about how I am managing to work all of these early inferential projects into my Intro Stats course. 1) Switching from Chapter Exams to a Midterm and a Final In the first 7 chapters of our textbook I used to give 4 exams. That means that I would use 4 days for exams and approximately 6 days for review. I have 4 days built into my calendar for review (2 days) and the midterm…
This semester I have incorporated a three-pronged strategy in my intro statistics classes: Flip the classroom – having students learn material at home Make the classroom more engaging – using more group activities and Learning Catalytics sessions Focus on early inferential statistics early and often This week began with students learning about the 5-number summary and how to create a boxplot. On Monday we did an activity where students compared two samples of quantitative data in an effort to determine…
My students are wrapping up the part of the course where we cover descriptive statistics. I gave them two sets of data (test scores from two different versions of the same exam) and they spent the day in class computing sample statistics and creating graphs for each sample. Their overall goal was to analyze their results and determine whether there was a significant difference between the two versions or not. Download a pdf of this activity Students compared measures of…
This week I began with a bootstrap project for a paired-difference/matched-pairs scenario. Download a pdf of the Project Here One of my goals is to get students working with data they have collected, so I had students collect prices for 25 identical items at two stores. We used this for one of the investigations. Investigation 1 A researched was investigating whether sons are taller than their fathers. My students were provided with 13 matched pairs. I had them find the…
Last week we did our third project that focuses on introducing inferential statistics earlier in the semester. Download the Activity (pdf) Here The bootstrap method repeatedly samples from a sample (with replacement) to help develop an interval estimate of any population parameter. For example, if there is a sample of 10 numerical values we select 10 values (with replacement) and compute the mean of that sample. We then repeat that process for a total of 1000 samples. We can then…
On day 7 of instruction in my intro statistics course we spent the class working through a project comparing two population proportions using resampling. Click here to download a pdf copy of the project: Two Proportion Resampling Hands-On First Mike Sullivan recommends a hands-on simulation before turning to the computers, so I began by using poker chips for this scenario: A random sample of 15 students at my college had 9 female students in it (60% female), while a random…