Teaching Statistics: Am I the Lone Dinosaur?
Teaching statistics in a social science department can be a daunting task for the new or part-time
faculty member. Students have a wide range of abilities, aptitudes, interests, and motivation
levels. Of course, as we all know, many social science students fear statistics. Approximately
80% of the graduate students experience statistics anxiety. Although this anxiety might hinder
performance, many survive the course. What I find interesting is that some of these students
may go on to teach undergraduate statistics courses as part of their graduate teaching duties.
If graduate students fear statistics courses, then it is highly probable that the undergraduates fear statistics as well, if not more so. These anxieties may include fear of asking questions, having difficulty in providing conclusions from the data, and perhaps being intimidated by the faculty member given the topic and knowledge base. The mathematics in this course is fairly simple, yet the concepts may be somewhat abstract. Hence, how does one make an abstract concept easy to digest? Perhaps one way is to provide a real-life example.
There are almost as many ways to teach statistics as there are statistics professors. For
example, in our psychology department, there are three tenured faculty members who teach
the majority of the undergraduate sections. One faculty member uses the eyeball estimation
method, which is certainly novel. A second professor uses SPSS in her course, which is quite
laudable. My approach has been to have students calculate problems by hand. These problems include z-scores, confidence intervals, ANOVA, subsequent tests to ANOVA including range tests, and correlation.
Psychol Cogn Sci Open J. 2016; 2(1): e1-e3. doi: 10.17140/PCSOJ-2-e003
