Literature Index

It now appears that all traditionally taught college courses are markedly (though unintentionally) biased against many non-traditional students, and, indeed, against most students who have not attended elite preparatory schools. Thus, when we teach merely in traditional ways we probably discriminate strongly on grounds quite different from those we intend (assuming that we intend only effort and merit). Easily accessible changes in how we teach have been shown repeatedly to foster dramatic changes in student performance with no change in standards - in some cases, no students now earn failing grades. Similarly dramatic improvements have been shown in the uniformity of outcomes. For example, the gap between Black performance and the performance of other groups can be entirely eliminated, even in "hard" courses such as calculus.

The purposes of this paper are to illustrate the use of several assessment strategies in an advanced course in statistics, and to present the results of student ratings for each assessment strategy in terms of difficulty, appropriateness, level of learning achieved, and preference. The assessment strategies used include structured data analysis assignments, open-ended data analysis assignments, reviews of applied research articles, and annotating computer output from multivariate software procedures. Findings indicate that students "prefer" instructor-directed or structured assignments overall, but feel they learn the most when the assessment is unstructured and requires greater self-direction. Suggestions for incorporating these assessment strategies into the multivariate classroom, as well as examples of each strategy, are included in this study.

This study aimed to quantify the influence of student attributes, coursework resources, and online assessments on student learning in business statistics. Surveys were administered to students at the completion of both online and on-ground classes, covering student perception and utilization of internal and external academic resources, as well as intrinsic motivating factors for success in the course. Student performance as defined by quality points, various assignment points, and time spent on assignments, was not significantly different between on-ground and online students. However, use of resources and tools to complete homework and learn new topics differed. As a whole, students predominantly utilized homework as the first tool to learn new topics and complete homework, suggesting a paradigm shift in the way instructors should cater to student’s learning habits.

An important theme in an introductory statistics course is the connection between statistics and the outside world. This article describes some assignments that have been useful in getting students to learn how to gather and process information presented in the newspaper articles and scientific reports they read. We discuss two related assignments. For the first kind of assignment, students work through prepared instructional packets. Each packet contains a newspaper article that reports on a scientific study or statistical analysis, the original report on which the article was based, a worksheet with guidelines for summarizing the reported study, and a series of questions. In the second kind of assignment, each student is required to find a newspaper article themselves, track down the original report, summarize the study using our guidelines, and write a critique of the article. Here, we describe the guidelines we developed to help the student in reading the newspaper article and orginal source, and the procedures we used for each type of assignment. Examples of handouts and assignments appear as appendixes.