DO YOU TEACH DATA SCIENCE?

Can you help us either in identifying CORE DATA SCIENCE TOPICS or in exploring STUDENT ATTITUDES…or both?

Then read on…

Please join us as we explore the introductory, college-level data science class and the variety of settings in which it is taught. Specifically, we endeavor to 1) identify the wide range of topics covered in these classes, as well as 2) the role that students' attitudes play in the learning process. In order to empower data science education researchers to determine best-practices and impacts of interventions or teaching modalities, we will create a family of instruments to validly measure attitudes toward data science. This project, which we refer to as MASDER (Motivational Attitudes in Statistics and Data Science Education Research), is funded by the National Science Foundation (DUE-2013392).

If you teach an introductory, college-level data science class, there are two ways you could get involved:

What is Data Science? (You get asked this a lot, don't you?) We want to know what you teach in your introductory data science class. Please fill out our Introductory Data Science Topics Survey! This should only take about 15 minutes.
Sign-up to administer our pilot student attitudes instrument to your students! We request that you sign up to do this by April 14, 2023.

Feel free to share these opportunities with other colleagues who teach data science (or send us their contact information). We all know the value of quality data!

We hope you will participate in this important work! Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions.

Sincerely,

The MASDER Team

April Kerby-Helm, Winona State University, Data Science Co-Lead (akerby@winona.edu)

Michael Posner, Villanova University, Data Science Co-Lead (michael.posner@villanova.edu)

Alana Unfried (PI), California State University - Monterey Bay (aunfried@csumb.edu)

Marjorie Bond, Penn State University

Douglas Whitaker, Mount Saint Vincent University

Leyla Batakci, Elizabethtown College

P.S. This project has been approved by our Institutional Review Board (IRB). For the student attitudes survey, the IRB has set forth some guidelines that we must follow in conducting this research. We are including only courses taught in the United States and the survey should be assigned either for class credit or for extra credit in order to increase the response rates. We will share with you a list of students who completed the consent form, but we are unable to reveal additional student information or survey responses. Amalgamated, de-identified survey data will be publicly available at the end of the grant period. This folder contains information you can share with your IRB if they want to determine your eligibility to administer the survey. Your involvement in this project improves the quality of the final survey which we will develop.