Regardless of the level of sophistication of one's students, or the exact content of one's course, it is important to think broadly about the general messages one wishes to convey, and then to formulate a number of explicit goals one would like to achieve in teaching statistics to sociology students. Five such goals are discussed: 1) overcoming fears, resistances, and tendencies to overmemorize; 2) the importance of intellectual honesty and integrity; 3) understanding the relationship between deductive and inductive inferences; 4) learning to play the role of reasonable critic; and 5) learning to handle complexities in a systematic fashion. Illustrative examples are given to show how exercises can be tailored to the course's contents and the level of student backgrounds.
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