Learning Statistics at the Farmers Market? A Comparison of Academic Service Learning and Case Studies in an Introductory Statistics Course

Conceptualizing a Framework for Analysing College Statistics Textbooks in Terms of Text Accessibility

“…Learner's meanings of statistical terms. Making connections to the students' prior experiences in statistical concepts (e.g., Hiedemann & Jones, 2010;Wiberg, 2009) has been suggested when designing learning materials for college statistics (Idris, 2018). More specifically, making connections among students' prior understanding of the terms and the specialized meanings in text would be helpful for students (Berenson, 1997).…”

Successful Service-Learning for Statistics Students Studying Survey Sampling

“…Evangelopoulos, Sidorova, and Riolli (2003) carried out another study which considered undergraduate business statistics courses, where students again had an option to complete an SL project or an alternative research project involving the analysis of publicly available data. SL projects have also been compared to business case study assignments by Hiedemann and Jones (2010). In their study, four introductory business statistics courses received an SL project assignment and two sections completed business case studies.…”

“…Evangelopoulos et al (2003) administered a pre-and posttest unrelated to SL; instead, the data collected contained items from a Course Acceptance Survey to support the theoretical Course Acceptance Model introduced by the researchers. Hiedemann and Jones (2010) administered the Survey of Attitudes Toward Statistics (SATS) (Schau, Stevens, Dauphinee, & Del Vecchio, 1995) at the beginning and end of a semester in which students had the option to complete either an SL project or a business case study. The main interest of these authors involved the responses to two items about the importance of statistics in students' professional lives.…”

“…Although Thompson administered a pre-and posttest regarding SL attitudes, it is unknown from the information provided if the noted changes in attitudes are statistically significant as neither numeric data nor statistical results were given. Hiedemann and Jones (2010) have pointed out that in many research studies related to SL in statistics, a choice is given to students about whether to carry out an SL project or an alternative assignment (Evangelopoulos et al, 2003;Phelps & Dostilio, 2008;Root & Thorme, 2001). Therefore, the positive student attitudes towards the statistics discipline or other benefits observed from students who carried out SL projects may be due to self-selection bias.…”

“…When Hiedemann and Jones (2010) analyzed results from including SL projects in some course sections and business case studies in other sections, there was evidence that students carrying out SL projects were significantly less likely to agree that statistics will not be applied in their profession. Therefore, statistics students who have experience in SL seem to believe that their future employment prospects will require statistical knowledge.…”