The teaching of statistics to non-statisticians is a well established practice. Indeed such is the success with which the argument for the relevancy of statistics has been put that the practice has been extended to include undergraduate and postgraduate courses not just for engineers, nor only geographers and sociologists, but even such inveterately literary characters as historians! While the latter might be considered an extreme case, there is a common problem to be found in all courses of this nature. Put simply, it consists of convincing students of the relevance and utility of statistics to their particular discipline which in turn requires the conversion of plausible theory into credible practice, the plethora of validating bodies to be found in certain sectors of higher education, but too little time has been given to the more mundane, but no less important, task of actually teaching a course in a manner that successfully converts theory into practice. This paper describes the collaboration between a statistician and historian in teaching introductory statistics to history students.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education