Exploring Students Connections to and Conceptual Understanding of Statistics

Music City Center 

This case study explores how students make connections between upper-level undergraduate statistical content, their previous knowledge, and concepts from their fields of interest. The purpose of this study is to contribute to the growing field of statistics education research and find better practices for teaching statistics to undergraduate students. Students prefer to have an application and connection to material they're learning (Neumann, Hood, & Neumann 2013). The aim of this study is: do students that can make a connection with the new content strive for and achieve a deeper understanding of the content? This presentation will focus on an Exit Ticket collected in the middle of the semester involving point estimation. This artifact was coded for connections and level of understanding for analysis of the relationship between performance in the course with conceptual understanding of course content. Initial results suggest that students' articulations of connections between the course material and their interests demonstrate a rich understanding of the material.

Statistics Education

Statistical Reasoning

Case study

Undergraduate

Qualitative Methods 

Section on Statistics and Data Science Education