The Raising Factor, That Great Unknown. A Guided Activity for Undergraduate Students

Abstract

In the first years of their economics degree programs, students will face many problems successfully dealing with a range of subjects with quantitative content. Specifically, in the field of statistics, difficulties to reach some basic academic achievements have been observed. Hence, a continuing challenge for statistics teachers is how to make this subject more appealing for students through the design and implementation of new teaching methodologies. The latter tend to follow two main approaches. On the one hand, it is useful for the learning process to propose practical activities that can connect theoretical concepts with real applications in the economic context. On the other hand, we should design multidisciplinary activities that link concepts from different subjects. With this goal in mind, in this article we propose a complete activity for first year students in business administration and economics degree programs, aimed to reinforce some basic statistical and economic concepts, while other basic transversal skills are also practiced, all within the subject of statistics.

Learning through planning experiments : A case study in thermal comfort in hospitals

“…It is thus expected to identify the explanatory variables in this specific problem of indoor thermal comfort and, in the future, to extend the study to different waiting rooms with similar or distinct characteristics. As referred by Caballer-Tarazona and Coll-Serrano [9] "it is useful for the learning process to propose practical activities that can connect theoretical concepts with real applications". The statistical analysis of thermal comfort data was an opportunity to bring theory to practice and reinforced the need of a multidisciplinary activity that links different subjects in Engineering.…”

“…Following several authors' suggestion of integration of statistical theory and practice with in-depth case studies, realworld situations or multidisciplinary activities [7]- [9] this paper presents a multidisciplinary study involving experimental engineering and statistical analysis.…”