In April of 1997 the three authors organized a conference on assessment in statistics courses for the Boston Chapter of the American Statistical Association. This conference addressed five broad areas of assessment: assessing students (e.g., objective and open-ended test questions, assessment tools besides tests including labs, projects, or cases); assessing the course (e.g., techniques for assessing students' attidudes and values and their reactions to class activities, assignments, and instructional methods); assessing textbooks (e.g., what should a teacher look for in choosing a textbook); assessing software (e.g., ease of use, accuracy, usefulness in helping students construct their own knowledge of statistics); and assessing classroom innovations (e.g., how can an instructor decide if a new classroom innovation is successful). In this paper the authors will present a summary (and their impressions) of this conference.
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