Promoting Inclusion and a sense of Belonging in a new Intro Stats course: an Inside-Out Bottom-Up approach

Abstract

Background. In response to local and national calls for institutions of higher learning to attend to student well-being and social inequities, we created a new course named “Happy Intro Stats” (HIS) in Fall 2022. This course is designed to address the importance of self-care on mental health and help students understand inequities in mental health stigmas and access via statistical investigations. HIS is “fully inclusive” in the sense that this course is offered with minimum barriers – no prerequisites, no expectations on prior coding experience, and no costs for the textbook and software – and maximum support through student-centered designs and inclusive pedagogies. Drawing from the self-determination theory – which focuses on social-contextual conditions that foster students’ engagement in meaning learning – and other literature on inclusive teaching practices, we investigate the impact of the embedded self-care exercises and inclusive pedagogies on undergraduate student mental health and learning in a statistics classroom setting. The study aims to examine (1) whether those intentional designs help promote inclusion and students’ sense of belonging in an intro stats course, and (2) how such course may make a difference in students’ statistical learning and happiness over the course of a semester. Methods. In Fall 2022, besides Happy Intro Stats (HIS) course, I also taught concurrently a section of our existing intro stats course – “Intro to Stat Modeling” – which requires calculus as a prerequisite, uses a pricey textbook, and is taught without those intentional interventions embedded in HIS. We’ve collected data via multiple surveys through the semester and institutional course evaluations from both courses, and plan to use those data to conduct a comparative study along with some focus groups in Spring 2023. Implications. I believe that this is the first research project to study the intersection of SDS Education and mental health, and their interactions in college classrooms. It will not only address the worsening mental health status in college but also provide some realistic solutions to promote student (and faculty too) emotional well-being in a SDS classroom setting. The outcomes of this research will provide SDS educators with effective strategies and inclusive teaching approaches to help promote student sense of belonging in their classrooms and further enhance student learning in SDS.