Whether they are studying statistics as a disciplinary major or through service courses, students will be more motivated towards what they are learning, and will retain a richer recall of it, if they feel they are doing something worthwhile. I have previously argued that three elements in teaching are salient in giving a sense of worthwhileness: showing that statistics is interesting, useful, and substantial. The first two of these elements are already well discussed. But letting statistics be seen as a substantial discipline, in the sense of being resilient to challenging questioning prompted by students' own curiosity, has not been previously addressed in the statistics education literature. Here I show the kinds of challenging questions which serve this goal. The answers given need not be overly-detailed: what matters is that they satisfy students' curiosity. In this way they strengthen the students' sense that statistics is worth the effort of study.
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