What can we as instructors do to improve the quality of student learning and our own teaching? A great deal of research findings that were compiled in the 1980s are available to inform teaching in the 1990s. These research findings can be used by statistics teachers to improve the quality of student learning and their own teaching. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate assessment methods that can be used by the instructor to improve student learning and hence our teaching. Principles of good teaching based on research and ways to implement these principles in statistics classes are presented, which, in turn, will assist a faculty member in gathering information about the learning of his or her students and about his or her teaching. This paper is divided into four sections. The first section addresses the question as to why assess the statistics course. In the second section, the topic is what to assess in the statistics course, whereas how to assess the statistics course follows in the third section. After all of the data are gathered, what you do with the assessment information is the focus of the last section.
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