Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education: The GAISE College Report


Leader

Robin Lock, St. Lawrence University

Abstract

Two groups of statistics educators have been funded by a strategic initiative grant from the American Statistical Association to make recommendations on the teaching of statistics at both the PreK-12 level and the introductory college level. This session will focus on the recommendations and report of the college GAISE group. The report contains six recommendations that expand and update those found in the classic Cobb report of 1992. The report also lists a number of characteristics of a "statistically literate" student that should serve as goals to be addressed in any introductory statistics course. In addition to summarizing these goals and recommendations, we will focus on how the report might be implemented in practice to make incremental improvements to an existing course and look at some of the illustrative examples from the appendix.

Bio-Sketch

Robin Lock is the Jack and Sylvia Burry Professor of Statistics at St. Lawrence University, where he has taught since 1983 after receiving his Ph.D. in Mathematics & Statistics from UMass-Amherst. He has published papers and been invited to speak at numerous conferences and workshops on new methods, uses of technology, and web resources for teaching statistics. He recently co-authored with Rossman & Chance a version of the Workshop Statistics book incorporating the software package Fathom. He was elected a fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2000, is the current chair of the ASA/MAA Joint Committee on Undergraduate Statistics and chair-elect of the ASA's Section on Statistical Education. In addition to his work in statistics education, Robin is interested in applications of statistics in sports and edits the "Statistical Sports Fan" column in STATS magazine.

Results

Handout (PDF)