By Jing Chang (College of Saint Mary)
Abstract
I teach an introductory statistics course with a prerequisite of intermediate algebra. Class size ranges from 20 to 30 students. Students come from all programs in the university, including health professions, arts and sciences, and professional studies. Although students are all women, the population is diverse in other ways (e.g., first-generation, PELL eligible students, single mothers, and students with learning disabilities). In my statistics course I employ many techniques to reduce math anxiety such as hands-on activities and real life projects. One recent strategy has been to replace a midterm exam with a project. In the project, students record a 5–7-minute PowerPoint video using a real data set to teach sampling distribution of sample means and the Central Limit Theorem to someone who is not familiar with statistics. Students base their explanation around a data set that they collect and knowledge they have learned.