By Christopher Kinson and David Unger, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Information
We implement instruction for two sections of the advanced data analysis course – the “treatment” with Elizabeth Barkley’s student engagement techniques (SETs) built into the course structure and the “control” with the traditional lecture style with little to no SETs. Similar formative assessments are used in both sections. The objective is to share my experience as an Instructor who used the SETs and to highlight their impact on student learning and engagement within the treatment section. In the treatment section, we specifically incorporate a background probe, analytic teams, small group tutorials, poster sessions, and learning logs as SETs. We anticipate that students in the treatment section attain metacognitive, self-organizational, and collaborative skills that may not be realized in the control section. The advanced data analysis course, which is taught to graduate and undergraduate students in a computer lab of 40 seats per section, applies statistical inference, visualization, exploratory, and modeling techniques to real world data.