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How to teach statistics to higher education students: a reflection paper Gianluca Tognon

My personal background and experience in pedagogy I am a biologist, initially trained in cell biology, but I have subsequently developed a strong interest in human nutrition which inspired me to take a doctoral education in this field. I have subsequently specialized into epidemiology during a four year experience within Diogenes, a big international study on diet and obesity. Afterword, I managed to sell all my experience to Gothenburg University, which appointed me a position as researcher two years later. Now I am struggling to get the necessary qualifications to become a docent, which I hope will happen in a couple of years. Among the docentships requirements, improving my pedagogy skills is one of the most important. In relation to this, although I have been active as a teacher, since I have taught at courses both in Italy (to the students of two university Masters) and in Sweden (to public health and global health students), I have never considered the idea of improving my knowledge in pedagogy. At the moment I am attending the course this abstract refers to (Pedagogy 3) at the same time as Pedagogy 2. I have also attended a course on supervision of PhD students which, although not strictly pedagogical, provided me useful notions about how to deal with doctoral student supervision, an area where at present I have no experience. The subject of my work, the reason for my interest in it The subject of my work is how a teacher can deal with a technical and difficult subject such as statistics. Statistics indeed, is not an easy subject to teach and almost every statistics beginner experiences difficulties understanding the topic. The reason for my interest in it is that I work in the field of epidemiology, and my tasks include both to analyze data as well as teaching statistical analyses to students, who can have many difficulties to understand this subject. Specific problems concern the fact that the students generally have different backgrounds in statistics as well as different attitudes toward it (some might even hate it!). Anxiety also appears to be related to statistics achievement, although the nature of that relationship is unclear (Tremblay et al., 2000). On the other hand, statistical method is a vital branch of scientific method. It is widely used in most sciences, as well as in other fields. Some understanding of the nature of inductive inference from quantitative data is an indispensable part of a good scientific education (Hotelling et al., 1940). As a former (and sometimes present) student of statistics and epidemiology, I have attended different courses and I remember that when I took my first class in Italy, I was totally nave to the field and had just done some very basic tests on my data. During this first course, I managed to understand something, but I would have appreciated if some of my teachers had made a pre-evaluation of our knowledge, instead of delivering the course without knowing the students levels. Another example is a course I have recently attended, where the teacher who was supposed to teach us how to write the statistical programs, almost just read them on the slides without commenting them appropriately.

Therefore, I think that two important issues in this field are how to deal with stud ents prior knowledge in statistics (which might be at different levels inside the same class) and how to track what the students understand and to what extent. Technical issues are such that, when a single piece is not properly delivered to the students and they are not able to fully understand it, the students miss the concept required to understand the rest of the course. Based on the previous, my research questions can then be summarized as follows: 1. How can I be more effective in stimulating students interest from the beginning as well as how to keep them involved and on track during the whole course. 2. How to get at least the essential concept across my class, keeping into consideration the initial students level and the differences between students previous knowledge Connections to learning theories According to my previous knowledge, I think that both the constructivism and the social learning theories might be helpful to solve the above mentioned issues (Fisher and Kim, 1999; Hoover, 1996; Bandura, 1977; 1986; 1997). The constructivism theory states that learning is an active, contextualized process of constructing knowledge rather than the simple acquisition of it. Knowledge is constructed based on personal experiences and hypotheses of the environment. Learners continuously test these hypotheses through social negotiation. Each person has a different interpretation and construction of the knowledge process. The learner is not a tabula rasa but brings past experiences and cultural factors to a situation. Learning is therefore active rather than passive. According to Tobin (2000), constructivism is also a framework for thinking about how students can learn in given situations and how others can mediate in the process of learning. From a constructivist perspective, teachers should take into account what students know and what they can do, how students can negotiate meaning and build consensus by interacting with one another and with artifacts, and how students can put their knowledge to the test and receive feedback on its adequacy. That is, meaning is not something imparted or transmitted from teacher to learner, but is something learners have to create for themselves. Teaching is simply a catalyst for learning. When we teach we should have a clear idea of what we want our students to learn. More specifically, on a topic by topic basis, we should be able to stipulate how well each topic needs to be understood. It is thus important to start with the outcomes we intend students to learn (learning outcomes) and then we align teaching and assessment to those outcomes. Learning is constructed through the activities the students carry out and learning is therefore built on what they do, not on what the teacher does. The assessment is supposed to test how well the students achieve the intended outcomes, not about how well they report back to the teacher what the latter has told them during class. This is essentially what was defined by Biggs (1999) as the constructive alignment, where the constructive aspect refers to the idea that students build up meaning through relevant learning activities. A useful exemplification of how constructive alignment works is reported in the flow chart depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Flow chart showing how the constructive alignment theory works (Warren, 2004). Finally, it is equally true that people learn through observing others behavior, attitudes, and outcomes of those behaviors, which is the basis of the social learning theory. The founder of the social learning theory is Bandura (1977; 1986; 1997), who believed in the concept of reciprocal determinism, i.e. the world and a persons behavior cause each other. Bandura considered personality as an interaction between three components: the environment, the behavior, and ones psychological processes (ones ability to entertain images in minds and language). The social learning theory has sometimes been called a bridge between behaviorist and cognitive learning theories because it encompasses attention, memory, and motivation. My ideas to improve the effectiveness of my future classes I am presently one of the teachers at the epidemiology course Special Health in Public Health Epidemiology, which is held every year at the department of public health and community medicine of the University of Gothenburg and is offered to public health PhD and master students. Students have different backgrounds and experiences and come from different countries as well, so teaching to them is quite a challenging experience. In this context, I am personally involved in a statistics course, where I think some room for improvement is possible. In particularly, I noticed that some of the problems were that the students did not remember what they had studied the previous years in this subject and they needed a differential support from the teacher (particularly during the practical workshops) according to their specific backgrounds and statistical knowledge. Moreover, they come from different parts of the world, and had thus different expectations from teachers. Based on what I have reported above, I developed some ideas that I would like to apply, to improve my teaching in this course. What follows is a description of my thoughts, which have
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been organized into five different points: general approach and attitude toward the students, knowledge assessment, review of basic concepts, teaching plasticity, involvement of students and interactivity and finally feedback. a. General approach and attitude toward the students According to Fisher and Kim (1999), there are statistically significant relationships between the students perceptions of their learning environment and their attitude toward science. For a constructivist, learning is affected by the context and the beliefs and attitudes of the learner. Harvey et al. (1985) found that while attitude toward the statistics course, measured at the beginning of the semester, was significantly related to performance, attitude towards the field of statistics generally was not. This implies that the teacher have the potential to stimulate interest in his/her students, also suggesting that a supportive atmosphere can help achievement in the course regardless of attitude towards the field of statistics. Generally, a reduction in interest is stimulated by teachers who use a lot of mathematical formulas. Statistics can be taught to non-statisticians by minimizing the use of formulas and allowing students to understand more easily, get more involved and enjoy learning something that they thought was almost impossible to understand. Mathematicians should not teach statistics, while statisticians should be assisted in their teaching by non-statistician teachers assistants, who might be better at getting concept across a class of non-specialists. What I think is important for a non-specialist who is not interested in becoming a skilled statistician, is at least to develop his/her statistical thinking, i.e. to understand how data should be handled and how data analysis must be correctly approached. The basis of a statistical model is a function, whose simplest form is y = x, where y is the outcome variable we are interested to study and x is the determinant of this outcome that we want to test. This concept is fundamental to understand how statistics works. Anybody who would like to start a statistical analysis of any kind should also be able to decide if the analysis needs a parametric approach because the variables to analyze are normally distributed 1, or viceversa, a nonparametric approach. The interpretation of the p-value and the concept of what statistically significant means is also important and is strictly related to the concept of 95% confidence intervals, which identify the numerical area where there is 95% of probability to find the right answer of a statistical test. Finally, understanding the concept of errors and which kind of errors exist is also an important concept to acquire, to get a basic statistical knowledge. Of course, mean, median, standard deviation and standard error represent concepts that anybody who wants to approach statistics must be familiar with. Research on adults memories of learning mathematics during their school days suggests that a sequence of events is triggered when students experience an initial failure to understand (Allan and Lord, 1991; Tobias, 1994). An initial confusion is followed by a failure to receive adequate explanations or assistance from the teacher, leading to a loss of confidence and panic over the sense of lack of control of ones own comprehension. Eventually, students become bored or disinterested, and disengage from what they perceive to be a futile learning process. This process is often accompanied by students development of negative views of their
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The normal (or Gaussian) distribution is the continuous distribution which has mean equal to 0 and standard deviation equal to 1. Normal distributions are extremely important in statistics, since many statistical models basic assumptions implies that data distribute according to a normal function.

mathematical skills and their ability to handle quantitative problems. Gal and Ginsburg (1994), hypothesized that similar processes happen in statistics classes. Statistics educators, therefore, need to be sensitive to students emotional and attitudinal status since such factors impact on the learning and teaching process in statistics. b. Knowledge assessment Learners construct new understandings using what they already know. Learners come to class with knowledge gained from previous experience, and that prior knowledge influences what new or modified knowledge they will construct from new learning experiences. This is why, before starting any course which is not basic, it is always a good idea to assess the students levels in the field. For instance, when I last was involved in teaching a statistics class, my colleague and I prepared some slides asking some key questions in relation to the topics covered by the course and asked the students to reply by means of clickers. The latter were connected to a receiver, which could be plugged in into the computers USB, so that a summary of answers appeared in a PowerPoint slide. The students had fun and we were able to understand what was lacking in their backgrounds and what was not. c. Review of basic concepts Although the students who follow our statistic course are supposed to have attended a basic statistics course the year before, last time most of them had forgot many basic concepts and had some difficulties to follow the lectures. What our students are required to be familiar with the concepts of mean, medians, standard error and deviation as well as to have an idea of what the p-value is and how it is used. Knowledge of the meaning of 95% confidence intervals and their application is also desirable. One idea we had for next year is to include an extra lecture, to review some useful basic statistics concepts together with the students. The results from the knowledge assessment could also be used to select the most suitable subjects to review during this introductory lecture. Fundamental is also to understand and to build on students statistical thinking and give them the tools to correctly understands the concepts of hypothesis making and testing. Since it is the statistical reasoning that should be focused upon instead of the statistical computation (Garfield, 2005; Garfield et al., 2009), even students with low mathematical level can learn statistics. Although the students do not have to understand the mathematical proofs behind each rule, they should understand the expert reasoning behind those rules (Mvuddudu, 2005). d. Teaching plasticity Even after having taught the students the basic concepts they need to understand what is taught at the course, their different backgrounds and levels (they are both master and PhD students) will probably end up in a natural stratification of different groups of students, bound to terminate the course with different proficiency levels. What I generally try to do when I teach statistics instead, is to understand from the very beginning, which are the students who have a limited knowledge of the subject and to focus more on them, particularly during the practical workshops, where the students can solve practical problems by means of statistical software. On the other hand, I also try to identify the best students and challenge them with more complicated versions of the exercises and I
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stimulate them to interact with the least knowledgeable, both to help the latter, but also to self-assess their understanding. Finally, in order to keep students involved during the course, it is useful to prompt them with questions and frequently asking for a feedback on their understanding. A good example was given at the Pedagogy 2 course I am attending, where one of the teachers made his lecture more plastic by switching from one part to the other, according to the answers the students gave when prompted with questions designed to check their knowledge of specific subjects. This requires to prepare more slides than necessary, since some will be skipped due to the fact that the students do not require them, but this method represent a very good model to tailor the lecture to the students previous knowledge. e. Involvement of students and interactivity In mathematics and science education in particular, a constructivist learning environment has been espoused as an effective environment for student learning (Duit et al., 1996; Fraser and Walberg, 1995). The primary assumption of constructivism, states that learning involves a framework of social interaction where knowledge is constructed and not transmitted, ideas and facts are exchanged through personal connections, and individual modes of learning are encouraged (Lickteig, 2004). A constructivist-oriented teacher must be skilled in structuring the social climate of the classroom such that students discuss, reflect on and make sense of statistics tasks. Statistics instructors need to study how students think about the particular statistics topics they teach and work to understand their students thinking at a level deeper than everyday communication. In this regard, I am convinced that the simple frontal teaching is not the best way to instruct students. The latter must be involved into discussions and stimulated to do group work, for example during practical workshops where they can be prompted with practical problems to solve. It is important to note that just using co-operative groups does not necessarily make teaching more constructivist. Students can work in groups in different ways, many of which are consistent with the constructivist views of learning. However, according to my experience both as a student and as a teacher, workshops are extremely useful and should be included in every statistics teaching program. Additionally, the students should be supervised by trained teachers, who can help with the exercises, which are the best complement to theoretical lectures. Indeed, one of the main goals of statistics education is to develop flexible problemsolving and data-analyzing skills, as opposed to merely imparting computational and procedural skills (Moore, 1990). The creation of a problem-solving environment by giving the students real-life problems to solve (e.g. to identify the social determinants of being a cocacola consumer) for learning statistics requires that teachers build an emotionally supportive atmosphere where students feel safe to explore, conjecture, hypothesize and brainstorm. Bridging the gap between reality and numbers is the hardest part. Not all numbers are data. The context makes the numbers meaningful, therefore examples should be presented in the context of real-world problems (Garfield et al., 2002). f. Feedback Instructor evaluation is an important part of the constructivist teaching progress (Au, 1998) and it is therefore very important that feedback from the students is asked at the end of the

course to improve the course in following years. The questions should be related to all the course modules, in order to test for specific problems in each particular area. Conclusions I hope that the ideas exposed here will provide a good contribution to the improvement of the statistics course we offer at our department. More in detail, to reply to my initial question of how to stimulate students interest and keep it alive during the course, in agreement with what Harvey et al. (1985) wrote, I will commit not be influenced by the general attitudes the students might have in relation to statistics, while trying to stimulate their interest into our course and keeping them involved by using examples from real life as suggested by Garfield et al. (2002). These examples can be taken from the news, e.g. the increase in Borrellia infections reported these days on the Swedish TV. Concerning question n. 2, I will keep assessing their basic knowledge from the beginning (by means of clickers), but I will repeat this assessment during the course to check if the students are on track. Social learning theories (Bandura, 1977; 1986; 1997) and their applications will be useful, particularly in relation to group work activities to stimulate students interactions. I will also try to make my lectures more plastic by skipping some parts in case students are already skilled enough in some topics. Some changes have already been applied to the latest edition of this course, for instance we have assessed students previous statistical knowledge (see above, the clickers test) and discovered that they had forgot some of the statistical knowledge they were supposed to have. This induced us to consider the idea of providing an extra basic lecture at the beginning of the course next year. We have also used workshops with computer exercises and we were able to see that some students were more talented than others. Although we could not really differentiate the level of teaching according to their expertise, we had the possibility to concentrate more on tutoring the least skilled. However, there remains some room for further improvement and I think that the present reflection paper will be of help both to me and our future students. Reference list 1. Allan, L. and Lord, S. (1991). For a Number of Reasons. Redfern, Australia: Adult Literacy Information Office. 2. Au, K.H. (1998). Social constructivism and the school literacy learning of students of diverse backgrounds. Journal of Literacy Research, 29, 111-115. 3. Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: W.H. Freeman. 4. Bandura, A. (1986). Social Foundations of Thought and Action. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. 5. Bandura, A. (1977). Social Learning Theory. New York: General Learning Press. 6. Biggs J. (1999). Aligning teaching for constructing learning. The higher education academy. 7. Duit, R., Fraser, B.J. and Treagust, D.F. (eds) (1996). Improving Teaching and Learning in Science and Mathematics. New York: Teachers College Press.

8. Fisher, D.L. and Kim, H. (1999). Constructivist learning environments in science classes in Korea. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Montreal (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 431 611). 9. Fraser, B.J. and Walberg, H.J. (eds) (1995). Improving Science Education. Chicago, IL: The National Society for the Study of Education. 10. Gal, I. and Ginsburg, L. (1994). The role of beliefs and attitudes in learning statistics: towards an assessment framework. Journal of Statistics Education, 2(2). 11. Garfield J, Ben-Zvi D. Helping Students Develop Statistical Reasoning: Implementing a Statistical Reasoning Learning Environment. Teaching Statistics. 2009;31(3):72-7. 12. Garfield J.B. Innovations in teaching statistics: Mathematical Assn of Amer; 2005. 13. Garfield, J.B., Hogg, B., Schau, C. and Whittinghill, D. (2002). First courses in statistical science: the status of educational reform efforts. Journal of Statistics Education, 10(2). 14. Harvey, A.L., Plake, B.S. and Wise, S.L. (1985). The validity of six beliefs about factors related to statistics achievement. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago. 15. Hoover, W.A. (1996). The practice implications of constructivism. SEDLetter 9(3). 16. Hotelling H. The Teaching of Statistics. The Annals of Mathematical Statistics. 1940;11(4):457-70. 17. Lickteig, M.K. (2004). Creating meaningful learning through autobiography and constructivist design. Nurse Educator, 29, 89-90. 18. Moore, D.S. (1990). Uncertainty. In: L.A.Steen (ed.). On the Shoulder of Giants: New Approaches to Numeracy, pp. 95137. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. 19. Mvududu N. Constructivism in the Statistics Classroom: From Theory to Practice. Teaching Statistics. 2005;27(2):49-54. 20. Tobias, S. (1994). Overcoming Math Anxiety. New York: Norton. 21. Tobin, K. (2000) Constructivism in science education: moving on. In: D.C.Phillips (ed.) Constructivism in Education: Opinions and Second Opinions on Controversial Issues, pp. 22753. Chicago, IL: Ninety-Ninth Yearbook of the National Society for the study of Education, Part I. 22. Tremblay, P.F., Gardner, R.C. and Heipel, G. (2000). A model of the relationships among measures of affect, aptitude, and performance in introductory statistics. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, 32(1), 408. 23. Warren (2004) Constructive Alignment - and why it is important to the learning process. Chapter from: Learning and Teaching Theory for Engineering Academics. Loughborough: HEA Engineering Subject Centre. The chapter is available at: http://exchange.ac.uk/learning-and-teaching-theory-guide/constructive-alignment.html

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