Current research and theory indicate that college students' scientific and statistical reasoning skills are deficient, but can be improved through instruction. Accordingly, an innovative statistics course was developed for the undergraduate education curriculum at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The course promoted the idea "that the purpose of statistics is to organize a useful argument from quantitative evidence, based on a form of principled rhetoric" (Abelson, 1995, pp. xiii). Most instruction was anchored to mentored, small-group collaborative activities that simulated complex real-life problem solving. In conjunction with the second offereing, evidence of student growht was obtained from pre- and post-course interviews designed to assess students' ability to reason with statistical evidence from everyday sources. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses indicated that students made meaningful gains in the ability to reason statistically. Analyses also pointed to specific conceptual confusions, some related to course design. Students' reactions to the course were variable.
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