An Effective Teaching Method of the Course “Probability Theory and Mathematical Statistics” in Higher Education by Formative Evaluation

Abstract

Abstract-"Probability Theory and Mathematical Statistics" is a public mathematical elementary course for all science and engineering specialties in colleges and universities. It is because this course applies widely in many other professional courses of the specialties of science and engineering. But this course is full of theoretical knowledge and almost no practical experiment. It makes the students show little interest in this course. In this paper, we analyze disadvantage of classic educational method in course "Probability Theory and Mathematical Statistics" at first. Then with practical nature of itself, we provide a novel evaluating method after a long time teaching practice in this course. We improve the classic evaluating method, which is examination on paper only, but bring the formative evaluation in the evaluating method. Finally, based on the new evaluating method, experiment results show advantage and effectiveness of this improved evaluating method.