This unit was the first major unit I taught on my own. I learned a number of things about myself and my students that laid a roadmap for how I will run this entire course during the next semester.
Instruction and homework
I provided instruction through a lecture at the start of each unit. My lecture focused on the big picture and used engaging group activities to capture student attention, but it was far too devoid of concrete example problems. Students always struggled with the homework problems, and although they worked on them in class where they could get help, the problems felt very disconnected from our big picture activities. Additionally, I felt that the homework problems were unnecessarily wordy and application problems were used too early in the teaching process in the book.
To counter this, I will create or obtain a large set of problems for each type of problem students will encounter using the simplest wording possible. This will allow students to practice the mechanics of the calculations. I will follow this with contextualized problems that make the work more applied and realistic. I do not plan to hand out the textbook next semester unless students ask for it as an additional resource.
Instead of using these problems as examples in front of class, I will create videos and guided notes packets for students to do this at home. This way, class time can stay focused on applications and group learning while still giving students the examples they need.
Additionally, I do not want to check homework completion for a group of juniors and seniors, especially when they have access to the complete solutions manual. Instead, I will give short homework quizzes at the end of each day’s lesson (after students have time to work on problems together and ask me questions in class). These will provide me with a clear sense of where students are at (do they need to be retaught the lesson, do I need to check notes for completion for some students, did I do a poor job teaching one topic, etc.). They will also provide students with a chance to verify that they understand the topic as well as they thought they did going into the assessment. Since they are worth only 5% of the grade, they should not add significant stress to students from their timing at the end of the period. I will still have quizzes over 2-4 days’ worth of material to check for content retention and make sure that students can apply their knowledge in a mixed-content setting.
Student feedback
I did not initially plan to do a project on the five chapters in this unit, and in fact, had no idea what project I would do if I was interested. However, student understanding (based on quiz scores) and student frustration was growing very high by the time we reached the hypothesis testing chapter. I didn’t know what to do, so I put everything on hold for a half of a day, made students push the desks to the edge of the room, and we all sat in a circle on the floor. I asked everyone, if they wanted, to share their frustrations with the group. I also shared my frustrations (students not doing homework or working hard in class, etc.). Next, we went around the circle again, this time sharing ideas to improve things. I told the students about my college experiences in project based learning and how the traditional style of class bored me too.
This experience helped me build a strong relationship with the class – students felt that, despite how things were going, I really cared about them and their learning. It also primed me with the ideas that eventually led to the Minute to Win It games and paper. Though I hope things don’t come to this point in the future, I always want to keep a strong pulse on student feelings and be ready to put on the brakes when things are not working.
Projects
The best part about this unit was the project I gave students the week after our circle discussion. The project was fun, students were engaged in what they were doing, and everyone worked very hard at the objectives I set forth. I had a lot of fun as a teacher watching students run actual experiments, collect data, and make realizations about the effective and ineffective data collection techniques they used without my prodding. After playing the games, collecting and analyzing the data, and writing the paper, I was convinced that project-based learning needed to be a critical part of every unit in statistics. Additionally, I felt that using a detailed rubric and giving students multiple rounds of feedback was a very effective way to get them to work hard and produce a great project, so I will use something like this in all future projects.
Next semester, I created a new category in the grading breakdown called “project portfolio” and gave it a substantial 30% weight. Future students will not only have a large part of the grade made up by their project work, but they will also need to reflect on their work in writing and post it to an online portfolio that showcases all of their work (included in this 30%). By de-emphasizing the singular importance of tests and encouraging students to invest fully in their projects, students will be able to leave the course with tangible evidence of their learning.
Unit organization
The Byron stats course is broken into 4 units, each with 5 chapters. In the first and last unit, the chapters fit together well. However, the 2nd and 3rd units are an eclectic mix of topics that seem fairly unrelated to each other. This unit, the 3rd unit, included two-way tables (breaking down categorical information), the binomial distribution (a probability distribution), and 3 topics introducing inferential statistics. Given the chance to re-organize the order of the topics taught next semester, I will break the inferential statistics topics into a separate section with some of the chapters in unit 4. When doing this project and paper again, I will not use any of the topics from this set of chapters, but instead use it with observational studies, experimental design, and two-sample inference, as this is where is would more naturally fit and allow for a more meaningful paper. Reorganizing the order that content is taught next semester will greatly enhance the ability to do projects within every unit that bridge big ideas together and give students freedom to choose what they work on.
Final thoughts
This unit allowed me to experiment with a number of ideas in the use of class time, the types of homework problems, the use of projects, the implementation of projects, the organization of topics, and how I relate to my students. Though this unit was far from perfect, it started me on a path that should lead to a much more effective way of running my class next semester.