Hi Mark,
You raise a very good question, and it sounds like you and your
colleagues have studied it more seriously than I have. We have the same
pair of courses at Cal Poly (along with several other versions of intro
courses aimed at different student audience, such as business students
and engineering students and life science students). Your description
of the biggest difference between the courses is the same for us.
Unfortunately, we don't have a good answer to your question about
improving placement of students into thee courses. We have a Calc I
pre-req for the course that uses ISCAM, so students in that course are
primarily Statistics and Mathematics and Economics majors. We don't
find this placement method to be very satisfying, so we'll be interested
to hear what you and others come up with.
Best wishes,
Allan
On 12/4/2015 12:55 PM, Mark Mills wrote:
Statistics education colleagues,
We currently have two introductory stats courses here at Central College.
* Applied Statistics (MATH 215) is intended for more
mathematically/technicallymature/advanced students. We use
Rossman and Chance's ISCAM book, and students learn how to use
Minitab to do statistical tests and intervals.
* Intro to Statistics (MATH 105) is intended for students who are
not as sophisticated mathematically/technically. We use Tintle's
/Introduction to Statistical Investiations/ book, and students use
the accompanying applets to do much of the work for them.
We are struggling with finding an effective prerequisite to use to put
students in these two courses. Does anyone have ideas?
The biggest difference between the two courses is how fast and how
deep we can go with the material. In Applied Stats, we go faster and
make some deeper connections with the material. We also expect that
students can fill in some of the gaps as we go along. But in Intro to
Stats, we go slower and spend more time filling in gaps and making
connections for the students.
We are struggling with finding an effective prerequisite to use to put
students in these two courses. In particular, we'd like to have an
enforceable prerequisite for each course that would keep good students
from just taking the easy road with Intro to Stats. Does anyone have
ideas?
Currently, we simply use math placement results to decide this.
Students placing at or above Calc I or having completed (at least)
Precalculus are not eligible to enroll in MATH 105. However, as
strange as this seems, our current registration system cannot
check/enforce this prereq, so any student can actually enroll in
either course. So we end up having to police these criteria
ourselves--usually removing students from Intro to Stats and
encouraging them to enroll in Applied Stats. (Not a happy job...)
Lately, we have begun to wonder if using a math placement result that
is based on a scale from College Algebra to Multivariable Calculus is
really the best way to measure what will make a student successful in
a particular stats class.
We have done some analysis of a number of different possible
predictors of student success, and the one that seemed to be the
strongest was cumulative GPA. A GPA of 2.7 seemed to be the low end
for students who successfully completed Applied Stats. So we proposed
a pre-req of GPA <= 2.7 for Intro to Stats and GPA >= 2.7 for Applied
Stats, but our Registrar doesn't like it and has asked us to consider
a different pre-req.
We've talked a lot about this as a department, and we really don't
know where to go.
If anyone out there with a similar situation of having two intro
courses has an easy, effective, and enforceable way to determine
student placement, then I would enjoy hearing from you. Please just
reply directly to me and not to the SBI mailing list.
Thanks!
Mark
*Dr. MARK A.** MILLS*
Professor of Mathematics | Central College
812 University Street | Campus Box 06 | Pella, Iowa 50219
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Allan J. Rossman
Professor and Chair
Statistics Department
Cal Poly
San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
arossman(a)calpoly.edu
http://statweb.calpoly.edu/arossman/
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