Initial Findings about Graduate Teaching Assistants’ Training Needs to Foster Active Learning in Statistics

Abstract

As enrollment in introductory statistics courses across the country rises, more instructors for these courses are needed. Many statistics courses are now taught by Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs). Little is known, however, about the training needs of GTAs to foster active learning and promote conceptual understanding, critical recommendations of the GAISE guidelines to improve undergraduate learning in statistics. This talk will discuss changes to our lab activities to incorporate GAISE recommendations of teaching for conceptual understanding, foster active learning, and integrating real data. We will also discuss initial findings concerning the struggles GTAs have with connecting their theoretical knowledge to conceptual ideas concerning confidence intervals for one population proportion. The material is based on work supported by NSF DUE 1504587.