A Mixed Model of Teaching Graduate Statistic Course for Engineering Students

Music City Center 

Guided by ASA guidelines for statistics education and informed by literature reviews and student needs, we adapted Kern's six-step approach to redesign the "Statistics for Engineers and Scientists" course, previously taught in a theory-based manner. The redesigned course, termed the Mixed Model that was not seen in literature yet, includes both in-person and virtual students in the same class meetings and incorporates mixed active learning elements. Our evaluation revealed that most students responded positively to the redesign, particularly appreciating the integration of R into daily work and in-class active learning activities. This paper compared the learning performance of in-person and virtual students within the same class meetings, a comparison not previously documented in existing literature. We found that virtual students required more time to complete the same tasks as in-person students. Additionally, graduate students perceived the coursework as excessive, despite it being reasonable (~10 hours per week), potentially raising important questions about how to align educational goals with students' perceptions of a reasonable workload in graduate course education.

Graduate Statistics

Engineering

Mixed Model,
in-person,
virtual

Curriculum Redesign

Programming in R

Active Learning 

Section on Statistics and Data Science Education