As part of the assessment after an introductory statistics course, students had to do a small project and submit a written report describing their methods, results and conclusions. We supported the report writing and the project work by several means. Among others, we developed an "exemplary project report" they were introduced to. This project report was written in two columns. In the first column the report about a question concerning a data set is with our best knowledge, in the accompanying second column, we reflect on the choices and options to be made in the respective stages of the report. The aim is to stimulate meta-cognitive activity and to help the students seeing the general in the particular of the exemplary report. We got several dozens of project reports and analyzed them carefully. We developed a grading scheme with several dimensions, including the quality of introductory and concluding sections, the quality of method choice and the quality of analysis and conclusions. We did not only pay attention to statistical quality but also to questions of style of writing such as whether the project question is introduced in a motivating manner and whether clear and convincing conclusions are presented to the reader with good communicative means including adequate graphs. The grading scheme was used to provide feed-back to the students. On the other hand we used this scheme for a systematic analysis of the available project reports. Weaknesses and strengths, most difficult areas for our students were identified and we were able to reflect on the adequacy and the shortcomings of our guiding "exemplary report" and our grading scheme. I will present those findings of our study that seem to be generalizable with regard to the question of assessing students' knowledge by means of projects and of report writing.
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