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Interactive Engagement in the Classroom: Our Experiences with Teaching Upper-Level Statistics

Tuesday, October 22, 2013 - 11:00
Paul Gustafson and Will Welch (Professors, Dept of Statistics, UBC)
Statistics Seminar
Room 4192, Earth Sciences Building (2207 Main Mall)


Paul Gustafson co-taught STAT 300 in 2012/13 Term 1 using in-class activities in all classes. Students worked in pre-selected groups during lectures. Clicker questions were used to receive and give feedback to students during the worksheet activities. In addition, there was a two-stage midterm exam in this class, where students wrote the first part individually, and then wrote part 2 in groups.  Paul has also used worksheet activities in STAT 536 the past two years.

In 2012/13 Term 2, Will Welch taught STAT 305 using a similar model of in-class activities. He also used weekly Lab TA surveys to gather additional information to address student difficulties and created a Post Course Knowledge Retention Survey to interview past STAT 305 students. The latter gave surprising results.

Mainly via examples, Paul and Will will share their findings.

(This is joint work with Bruce Dunham and Gaitri Yapa.)