Beyond statistical methods: teaching critical thinking to first-year university students

We discuss a major change in the way we teach our first-year statistics course. We have redesigned this course with emphasis on teaching critical thinking. We recognized that most of the students take the course for general knowledge and support of other majors, and very few are planning to major in statistics. We identified the essential aspects of a first-year statistics course, given this student mix, focusing on a simple question, ‘Given this is the last chance you have to teach statistics, what are the essential skills students need?’ We have moved from thinking about statistics skills needed for a statistician to skills needed to participate in today's society. We have changed the way we deliver the course with less emphasis on lectures and more on alternative resources including on-line tutorials, Excel, computer-based skills testing, web-based learning materials and smaller group activities such as study groups and example classes. Feedback from students shows that they are very receptive and enthusiastic.     

Personal Excursions: Investigating the Dynamics of Student Engagement

We investigate the dynamics of student engagement as it is manifest in self-directed, self-motivated, relatively long-term, computer-based scientific image processing activities. The raw data for the study are video records of 19 students, grades 7 to 11, who participated in intensive 6-week, extension summer courses. From this raw data we select episodes in which students appear to be highly engaged with the subject matter. We then attend to the fine-grained texture of students’ actions, identifying a core set of phenomena that cut across engagement episodes. Analyzed as a whole, these phenomena suggest that when working in self-directed, self-motivated mode, students pursue proposed activities but sporadically and spontaneously venture into self-initiated activities. Students’ recurring self-initiated activities – which we call personal excursions – are detours from proposed activities, but which align to a greater or lesser extent with the goals of such activities. Because of the deeply personal nature of excursions, they often result in students collecting resources that feed back into both subsequent excursions and framed activities. Having developed an understanding of students’ patterns of self-directed, self-motivated engagement, we then identify four factors that seem to bear most strongly on such patterns: (1) students’ competence (broadly construed); (2) features of the software-based activities, and how such features allowed students to express their competence; (3) the time allotted for students to pursue proposed activities, as well as self-initiated ones; and (4) the flexibility of the computational environment within which the activities were implemented.