The usefulness of stochastic models and statistical inferences in a wide range of disciplines has gradually led to the inclusion of probability and statistics courses in many academic curricula. Unfortunately, the required course in statistics is often the most disliked and feared course in a student's curriculum. This is especially the case for "nontechnical" students who generally have limited mathematical capabilities. Instructors of statistics courses for such students often feel they must devote a significant proportion of their instruction to improving the students' algebraic and computational skills. In what follows, I shall report on a program we have been using for Management Science students at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. In this program, Texas Instruments T159 calculators are issued to all students entering the Management Science (MS) curriculum, and these personal calculators are used by the students throughout their six quarter program leading to a Master's degree in Management Science.
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