Following a course in elementary statistics, students are able to demonstrate a basic knowledge of statistical concepts and ideas, but often fail to apply this knowledge to concrete problems. From research in cognitive psychology, we know that the organization of knowledge starts with the mental storage of initially isolated concepts and simple principles. A certain amount of conceptual understanding is reached when the student succeeds in forming relationships between these knowledge elements. The task faced by any teacher in statistics, is to enable the student to form such integrated knowledge networks. Research has shown that the formation of such networks is stimulated when students, confronted with a statistical problem that requires the application of their basic knowledge, actively try to explain the solution of the problem to themselves. This paper discusses a didactic method that seeks to stimulate such self explanatory activity in students.
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