3D: HILT Activities: High Impact on Student Learning, Little Time in Class to Implement*

Abstract

Have you ever heard your students say “OMG, that’s so random!” or suggest that taking a random sample can be obtained by just “picking any of the people”? Do you worry that your students don’t really understand what a parameter is or confuse the statistical meanings of correlation and association? The statistical meanings of many words used in statistics (i.e., random, average, normal, parameter, correlation) differ from their everyday (colloquial) meanings. It can be easy for students in introductory statistics to confuse the two meanings of a word. As part of this session we will present HILT activities, those that have a High-Impact on student learning, but require Little-Time in class to complete, designed by a group of instructors (called HILT Instructors), to help students learn the correct meanings of targeted words and improve their understanding of the associated statistical content. The impact of these activities on student learning was measured using both qualitative data (written responses regarding a word’s meaning) and quantitative data (performance scores on the Comprehensive Assessment of Outcomes in Statistics (CAOS) and final exam questions). Data were collected from two groups of students: those exposed and those not exposed to the activities. After presenting videos of HILT Instructors implementing activities they designed, attendees of the breakout session will be shown, and asked to consider, data in the form of representative student responses and summary performance values from both groups of students. At least one of the participating instructors will be part of the presentation team to answer questions about the actual implementation of the activities. We will then provide time for the attendees of the session to consider modifications to the activities presented and/or topics or words around which they might like to develop HILT activities. The session will conclude with a brief introduction to the HILT-Statistics Wikispace (http://hilt-statistics.wikispaces.com/) that has been developed to house HILT activities and their associated materials and data.