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COLLEEN HOSKING AND MARY PARKERAUSTIN COMMUNITY COLLEGE
http://www.austincc.edu/mparker/talks/2012_jan20
PRESENTED AT THE DANA CENTER, JANUARY 20, 2012
Statway™: Classroom Experiences and Improvement Activities
This Presentation
In the year before the course began (course structure, recruiting, etc.): Slides 3-10
How did we organize to do continual improvement?: Slides 11-15
Classroom experiences: Slides 16-23
Success stories and rates: Slides 24-27
BEHIND THE SCENES
BEFORE THE YEAR BEGAN
Why Statway™?
Students haven’t been choosing to take
statistics because they see it as hard, even when the faculty in their majors talk with them about why it would be useful.
We haven’t had a good prerequisite course for Elementary Statistics.
How did we organize it?
A two-semester sequence (fall and spring)
The two Math for Stat courses are new courses we created.
Math for Stat IDevelopmental math4 contact hours
MATH 1342 (special section)3 contact hours +Math for Stat IIDevelopmental math1 contact hour
Why that organization?
Our department insisted.Better for transferability.There are some hassles, but we think
it is a good choice overall.
Who is eligible?
Placement into Elementary Algebra
College-level reading skills
In a program for which MATH 1342 will fulfill entire math requirement for associate’s degree and for expected bachelor’s degree, if that is relevant.
How did we recruit?
Presentation to counselors and advisors, with handouts.
Handouts for students “Do you need to take statistics?”
Handouts for students in developmental math classes about pathways through developmental math.
Classroom visits in appropriate classes.
Email message to students enrolled in Elementary Algebra.
What recruiting worked?
The targeted email messages. Of the 70 students who enrolled, more than 55 of them were from the targeted email messages.
Some of our faculty / administrators think that more classroom visits might have helped.
Definitely we need to get other disciplines to make their needs/preferences about required math courses clearer (Is MATH 1342 acceptable to
meet math requirement?) to help the advisors refer students appropriately.
What course materials do we use?
For both semesters:Statway lessonsStatway online learning materials
(http://www.mystatway.org/)
Our usual MATH 1342 textbook (David Moore’s Basic Practice of Statistics)
Statistical software (Crunch-It and Minitab)
Some additional materials in developmental math. (We may use this – still considering.)
IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGIES
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING PREPARED AND FLEXIBLE
We met at the end of each week for 3 – 5 hours. It seems like a lot, but we found it extremely helpful! Here is what we did that worked:
Debrief that week’s lessons Share experiences and strategies Discuss student problems and successes
Review student work and progress We gave common exams and similar HW; this made it
easier to compare (plus we could share the work of writing the assignments and exams)
Weekly Meeting
Discuss next week’s lessons We read these in advance of the meeting if at all
possible Head off logistical problems (like when a lesson
requires students to “bring a music player”) Anticipate student difficulties in lessons – where we
might need to slow down or supplement
Readjust Calendar Both instructors and students had to be very flexible! Letting students know ahead of time made them
better able to “go with the flow” as we felt our way through the material this first time through
Weekly Meeting
In-semester Adjustments
Homework – integrating our text with MyStatway and “Take it Home” assignmentso Our text definitely has some meaty problems that we
wanted student to grapple with. We started slow (one problem from the text mixed with their written lessons and MyStatway work online)
o One instructor had her students either solve the problem, or write down what questions they would need to have answered to be able to solve the problem
o We waited to integrate our text until the 4th week so they had time to get used to all the different avenues of instruction
We each made modifications throughout the semester to the structure of the class periods and the homework assignments. Here are some things I did in my Statway™ class:10-minute Introduction
• Lets students know what to expect in that day’s lesson
10-minute Wrap-up• Reminds students of key ideas that were discovered• Doing this as a PPT and posting it online was a nice
way to help them organize when they were reviewing for exams
In-semester Adjustments
IN THE TRENCHES
CLASSROOM EXPERIENCES
Starting the class with the students
Week 1 Contracts and expectations Groups Getting to know each other Experiencing the focus on activities What sorts of thoughts / solutions will be counted
right? Which ones will be wrong? (These questions require more consideration than you might think, particularly in Module 1.)
Weeks 1 - 3
How to start each part of the course? Activities Group work Software (mystatway.org)
Which parts will be graded? How many attempts for each checkpoint? When is feedback
available? How much is each part relevant to preparing for the test?
Paper homework Which parts will be graded? When is feedback available? How should they think about each part?
Using the other textbook Using statistical software
Shift in types of questions
Module 1 – Producing Data Activities ask for a lot of “what makes sense?” on
fairly complex questions. At first, how do you say that an answer is wrong – or not fully right – without discouraging students? How do you transition to “produce the correct answer on a test question”?
Module 2 – Summarizing data Lots of “thought questions” in activities but also lots
of problems to do in homework where it is easy to say what is a wrong answer.
Preparing for a test
• What kinds of summaries of important concepts will you provide?
o We collected the learning objectives in the lessons in the module.
• When – before they start the material, during it, or at the end when giving a test review?
o At first we gave it during the test review. We gave them out somewhat earlier after Test 1.
Why we pulled in 12.1
Module 3 covers regressionWe thought the students needed to see exact
linear models (finding the equation of a line using two points, meaning of slope and intercept) before seeing these in the context of statistical relationships
Mixed successo Students didn’t do well on this on the test.o Students did say that it helped them with the Module
3 work on lines.
Computation in the activities
In Module 2, for the standard deviation, we didn’t do as much of “square all the deviations and sum them” as the activity called for. That would have taken more time than we had for that lesson.
Similarly, in Module 3, the material on SSE and SST was too much. We did talk about the coefficient of determination but shortened the “build-up” to it by informally showing it graphically and then saying that it is algebraically equivalent to r-squared.
Tests
The tests from Carnegie are more focused on multiple-choice questions than we have been used to in our statistics courses.
The weaker students (in particular) were not good at knowing whether they were prepared for a test with a heavy emphasis on multiple choice questions.
We expect to think more about how much we base our test grades on the multiple choice and how much on the free-response questions.
HOW IT’S ALL GOING
SUCCESS STORIESAND RATES
What do students think?
“First math course where I feel like I understand anything.”
“My favorite college course. No one has ever let me talk about what I’m thinking so much.”
“When I read articles in the newspaper that talk about data, I feel like I know understand what they’re talking about.”
“Quit telling us stuff now. We need to get into our groups and figure it out.”
And…
“I have trouble learning without more practice doing the computations. Will you give me more?”
“You didn’t give us very many practice problems doing the computation. How can you expect that I would do that correctly on the test?”
“I got that multiple choice question wrong because I didn’t read all the choices before I answered it.”
Success rate so far at ACC
Three classes at ACC this fall, with a total enrollment of 70.
End of first semester 48 passed out of 54 still enrolled.
So far 43 have enrolled (and paid) for the second semester with still about six days of registration left. (We expect all 48 will enroll.)
We are pretty confident that almost all of those left will be able to pass the second course.
