Teaching Philosophy

Knowledge of statistics is very important for the study of many different disciplines such as biological, medical, and psychological fields. My simple teaching philosophy is illustrating the beauty of statistics. To achieve my goal, first, I provide notes and PowerPoint slides to my students. Second, I motivate my students to practice statistical methods in real-life problems. Third, I engage the students to practice their statistical skills and grasp of statistical methods.

When I assigned as a graduate teaching assistant in the Mathematics and Statistics Department at UMKC, it was my pleasure to teach my course, STAT 235: Elementary Statistics. In this course, I prepared the syllabus, course notes for the entire semester during the summer in cooperation with the statistics coordinator. The materials were available to the students once they enroll in the class. I believe that submit the syllabus before the semester begins, will give the students an idea about the chapters that we will cover, grading criteria and the amount of effort required for the course. Also, submitting the notes will allow students to have great opportunities to listen to me during lecturing and to ask questions, rather than scrambling to copy down the notes. I think when students are so busy writing they fail to listen to what I say which leads to a lack of understanding of the lecture.

Moreover, this course is one of the undergraduate requirements who are from different majors. Based on this and according to cognitivism theory in learning, I presented different examples in the class of different applications in sociology, psychology, biology, and medicine. These applications will help the students to understand how statistics are related to their majors and show students how to apply statistical techniques to real-life problems and try to solve it. Also, on some statistical concepts, I share real statistical issues from different disciplines with my students and we discuss that together to figure out how we may apply that concept on selected discipline.

Additionally, I believe that students gain statistical skills when they practice it not just learning it. Based on that, I assigned 2 types of homework. The first type of homework is online homework. I create a course page in Pearson myStatLab. Every time a student logs into myStatLab will be able to see any due assignments. Homework will consider late after the listed time, and late homework will be accepted, but it will be marked down 50% after the due time. This type of homework focus on conceptual and theoretical parts of statistics. The second type is written homework which assigned 5 times throughout the semester. It includes problems that contained at least one data analysis problem where students had to input a real dataset into the SPSS or StatCrunch statistical software and analyze the input then interpret the output. These questions will teach them how to put their data analysis skills to good use and to demonstrate their grasp of the material, rather than simply plugging in numbers into equations.

Furthermore, based on the constructivism theory of learning, students need to have a prior base of knowledge for constructivist approaches to be effective. Therefore, In the mid of the semester, I divided the students into groups, and each group has assigned a project. In this project, students are real statisticians. They choose the dataset in any subject they want, and assign simple statistical issues such as regression and correlations concepts, and find the solutions for that. On the due date which always be the week before the final exam week, each group represents their work, draws the conclusions and receives and answers questions from other groups.

When I applied the methods that I mentioned above, I found that many students in my class responded very well and remained actively engaged with the material which leads to 92% of students pass the class with A.