By Ashok Krishnamurthy, Michael Myer
Information
CougarStats is a free, and open-source R Shiny application designed to conduct statistical data analysis. CougarStats aims to simplify statistical concepts and foster learning with a user-friendly browser-based interface. In the context of statistical education, there is a need for intuitive and comprehensive tools that are accessible to a wide range of users, from students to instructors. CougarStats is designed to address this need, providing a platform to conduct statistical data analysis across a growing list of topics while presenting detailed calculations. Current pedagogical topics include Descriptive Statistics, Probability Distributions, Sample Size Estimation, Confidence Interval and Hypothesis tests about population means and proportions, one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Simple Linear Regression, and Correlation Analysis. I have adopted the CougarStats tool in the weekly lab sessions of my introductory statistics classes with 35-40 students at an undergraduate arts and science Canadian university. Formative assessments were gathered from users and the tool was tailored based on real-time data/feedback. Summative assessments were obtained to evaluate student learning by comparing it against other popular statistical software (e.g. StatCrunch, Excel). Students appreciate how CougarStats not only shows the answer to a problem, but breaks down each step. Students have conveyed to me that this tool has been great with helping learn and understand statistics.