DO YOU TEACH STATISTICS OR DATA SCIENCE?

ARE YOU WILLING TO PARTICIPATE IN RESEARCH TO UNDERSTAND THE IMPORTANCE OF ATTITUDES IN THESE DISCIPLINES?

THEN READ ON…

Dear Colleague,

Folks on this list are invested in their students, so might be interested in this opportunity. We invite you to join us as we study the role that attitudes play in the learning process. We are working on a project funded by the National Science Foundation (DUE-2013392) to develop validated instruments measuring student and instructor attitudes toward statistics and data science. We refer to this project as MASDER (Motivational Attitudes in Statistics and Data Science Education Research).These instruments will allow us to measure attitudes toward statistics or data science, which will create useful evidence in determining best-practices and impacts of interventions or teaching differences. We hope you will participate in this important work.

There are a number of ways you could get involved this fall:

• Do you TEACH STATISTICS at the introductory level?  There are two ways to participate:

o Participate in our INSTRUCTOR FOCUS GROUP! We are offering $30 gift cards to participants in one of the Zoom sessions in early October. 

o Share YOUR attitudes toward statistics via our pilot instructor attitudes instrument  This should take about 15 minutes. (If you have already taken this survey, you do not need to take it again.)

• Do you TEACH DATA SCIENCE at the introductory level?  There are two ways to participate:

o Sign-up to administer our pilot student attitudes instrument to students in your data science course!

o WHAT IS DATA SCIENCE?  We won’t try to answer this question for you, but 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.

Feel free to share these opportunities with other colleagues who teach statistics and data science.  We all know the value of data!  Please let us know if you have any questions.

Thank you in advance for your help!  

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

Marjorie Bond, Penn State University

April Kerby-Helm, Winona State University

Michael Posner, Villanova University

Douglas Whitaker, Mount Saint Vincent University

Leyla Batakci, Elizabethtown College

P.S. If you would like more detailed information about the project, keep reading:

This project has been approved by our Institutional Review Board (IRB). The IRB has also set forth some guidelines that we must follow in conducting this research, which we describe herein. Please note that due to our IRB approval and scope of grant, we are only recruiting courses taught in the United States. The student 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. Your involvement in this project improves the quality of the final survey which we will develop. Amalgamated, de-identified survey data will be publicly available at the end of the grant period, as well as additional material. If you would like to connect with your IRB before administering the survey, you may provide them with this folder that includes information they might need to determine your eligibility to administer the survey.