Most institutions of higher learning in the United States offer introductory statistics courses in a variety of flavors. Integration of the subject-specific concepts with the basic applied statistical techniques should be the primary goal of these flavored courses. Solely lecture-based traditional instruction method is not suitable to satisfying this objective. We argue for the incorporation of business-style cases into the introductory statistics curriculum using Constructivist learning theory and the notion of the "liberal arts" education. A typical business case setup is presented and its compatibility with an introductory statistics course is assessed. Finally, a sample business-style case for the application of the simple linear regression is provided.
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