We compare the effectiveness of academic service learning to that of case studies in an undergraduate introductory business statistics course. Students in six sections of the course were assigned either an academic service learning project (ASL) or business case studies (CS). We examine two learning outcomes: studentsÅ' performance on the final exam and their perceptions of the relevance of statistics for their professional development. We find no statistically significant difference between ASL and CS students with regard to final examination performance, but students who participated in the ASL project as opposed to CS were less likely to agree that "Å[they] will have no application for statistics in [their] profession[s]." The estimated relationship is both large and statistically significant (p < 0.01).
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