Writing Assignments to Assess Statistical Thinking

Abstract

One of the main goals of statistics is to use data to provide evidence in support of an argument. This article will discuss some popular forms of writing assessments currently in use, to demonstrate the differences between the methods for structuring the students' learning to support their arguments with evidence. We share a model, which was originally created to assess students in introductory statistics and has been adapted for the second course in statistics, which takes a unique approach toward assessing the students' understanding of statistical concepts through writing. In this model, students are expected to answer prompts that required them to (1) take a stance on an argument, (2) defend their position with facts given in the prompt, (3) discern the implications that those facts implied, and (4) give a proper conclusion to their argument. We provide examples of a few of the writing assignment prompts used in the course, their intended assessment purpose, and common answers that students gave to these assignments. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Inferential Reasoning of Secondary School Mathematics Teachers on the Chi-Square Statistic

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The Promise of Portfolios: Training Modern Data Scientists

“…Although science and numbers appear objective on the surface, knowledge sharing in scientific fields, including data science, is essentially based on an argument and requires attention to elements of both style and rhetoric (Sutton, 1997;Woodard et al, 2020). A data-driven argument convinces someone of the validity of the findings, the appropriateness of the analysis, the generalizability of the conclusions, and the overall credibility of the evidence presented.…”

Chi-square Reference Meanings: a Historical-epistemological Overview

“…In this sense, diverse authors (e.g., Woodard et al 2020;Fellers and Kuiper 2020;DePaolo et al 2016;Seier 2014;Gibbs and Goossens 2013;Leigh and Dowling 2010), have reported activities or problems proposals with the finality to make more accessible the study of the 2 tests, goodness-of-fit, independence, and homogeneity, which correspond to the problem areas presented in the previous section. However, commonly, in these investigations, the last partial meanings of each problem area (i.e., PM3, PM7 y PM11) were used.…”