Modern teaching methods require students to be active participants in the learning process. Assigning projects to students sets a frame which cultivates the interactivity between the instructor and the students and motivates the students to explore the field. The objective of this paper is to present the results from the use of individual directed projects in the introductory statistics course at the Department of Political Sciences of Aristotle, University of Thessaloniki. We compare this group with another group of students who were taught the introductory statistics course with conventional methods. The results indicate that students in the project-based group grasped statistical concepts and ideas at a higher rate than students in the control group, had a better attitude towards statistics, and did not think that statistics is as hard to learn as students in the other group.
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