Student Perceptions of Engagement in an Introductory Statistics Course

Abstract

This article presents the results of a case study from one professor's experience teaching an introductory statistics course. The goal of this study was to better understand student perceptions of engagement in a statistics course. Voluntary, self-reported data were collected daily for students to evaluate the engagement level of the class that day, and students also identified activities that they considered engaging. A final survey was administered at the end of the semester to provide a holistic, retrospective measure of engagement in the course and to collect feedback on various questions related to perceptions of engagement. Results indicate variation in student engagement scores and variation in engagement scores across the semester indicating some influence of class activity on perceptions of engagement. Perceptions of engagement are contextualized with students' comments from the daily surveys. Associations between engagement and final course grade were also investigated. Student perceptions of engagement were also compared to the professor's perception of engagement for students.

Teaching beginner-level computational social science: interactive open education resources with learnr and shiny apps

“…This lack of STEM identity may contribute to barriers to learning computation-related skills (Berndt et al, 2021;Esnard et al, 2021). For example, their low sense of belonging/identity in computing (Chew and Dillon, 2014;Davies et al, 2015;Lawton and Taylor, 2020) may result in attentional biases (Okon-Singer, 2018;Cui et al, 2019) that further lower their engagement and motivation (Lawton and Taylor, 2020) and prohibit them from moving on to the next level (Davies et al, 2015). Additionally, these challenges have been identified among the under-resourced, marginalized under-represented minoritized (URM) population in STEM (Lisberg and Woods, 2018;Singer et al, 2020).…”

Attitudinal changes in face-to-face and online statistical reasoning learning environments

“…The researchers discovered that, although the mean changes in the subscale scores were greater in the first half of the semester, the majority of individual student scores varied in both halves of the semester. Lawton and Taylor (2020) took an even closer look at when the student attitudes change by asking how engaging the class was at the end of each class. Although their self-designed attitude scale can't be compared directly to the SATS-36, they found that (a) the most drastic changes occurred near the beginning and end of the course, and (b) the instructor consistently rated classes as more engaging than the average student.…”

Modern teaching methods in action in statistical classes

“…Many recent studies [29][30][31][32][33][34][35] show that implementing a project-based view either for an entire statistics course, a module in a course or as an assessment tool can result in the improvement of student engagement and admittedly make them learn more compared to traditional education. Students seemed to favour projects to be included in statistics because they could learn better in such an environment that simulated future work and could obtain skills that are valued at the labour market as well.…”