- Title
- Interdisciplinary teaching of statistics
- Creator
- Stojanovski, E.
- Relation
- 21st International Congress on Modelling and Simulation Society of Australia and New Zealand (MODSIM2015). 21st International Congress on Modelling and Simulation Society of Australia and New Zealand (MODSIM2015) (Broadbeach, Qld 29 November - 4 December, 2015) p. 1979-1983
- Relation
- http://www.mssanz.org.au/modsim2015/
- Publisher
- Modelling and Simulation Society of Australia and New Zealand
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2015
- Description
- While the understanding of statistics is essential for model developers and users in a range of areas, the teaching of this content is not without its challenges. Teaching the next generation requires the employment of suitable core teaching practices to motivate and thus better support integrated resource management in terms of developing and using statistical models. Teaching statistics often involves teaching end users from multiple disciplines simultaneously. There are often varying views among students undertaking statistics based courses of what statistics actually is and how it can be used in other courses of their degree and in the workplace such as in resource management. Feedback and attitudes of some students towards statistics subjects can be quite negative. The negative attitude could be due to a number of factors including the quality of previous exposure to statistics or mathematics or limited recognition of the role of statistics in other disciplines. From an interdisciplinary perspective, there is an increased need to motivate students to want to learn statistics and hence a focus on developing methods to achieve positive outcomes in interdisciplinary statistics. This paper proposes four teaching strategies designed to motivate students, make content more relevant to them and thus improve their learning and teaching outcomes. Clarifying the purpose of statistics to students both in society and for their specific disciplines is crucial and can be elaborated on in the first lecture in an attempt to capture engagement early. Creating an active learning environment to engage students' interest and extend on their understanding is also fundamental. Another principle to motivate students to learn is via the use of examples to which students can relate. These examples should include real world and current events to try to make links with students' interests and backgrounds. Employment examples should also be used for immediate relevance. From an interdisciplinary perspective, the core practices described have been employed in the classroom environment in an attempt to improve students' statistical knowledge and to consequently be able to better develop and use models to support integrated resource management. The proposed strategies were implemented in first and second year interdisciplinary statistics courses and have been received favourably by students in terms of improving the relevance of interdisciplinary statistics courses as well as the students' overall satisfaction with the course, which are the initial steps required to consequently improve student learning outcomes among the next generation of learners.
- Subject
- mathematics; statistics; student engagement; teaching
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1315480
- Identifier
- uon:22937
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780987214355
- Language
- eng
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