Introductory Statistics

TitleIntroductory Statistics
Faculty/College/UnitScience
StatusCompleted
Duration2 Year
Initiation04/01/2015
Completion12/30/2018
Funding Details
Year 1: Project YearYear 1
Year 1: Funding Year2015/2016
Year 1: Project TypeLarge TLEF
Year 1: Principal InvestigatorNancy Heckman
Year 1: Funded Amount140,459
Year 1: Team Members

Faculty of Science:

Nancy Heckman, Professor / Head, Statistics
Eugenia Yu, Instructor, Statistics
Bruce Dunham, Senior Instructor, Statistics
Mike Whitlock, Professor, Biology
Doug Bonn, Professor, Physics and Astronomy
Joss Ives, Instructor, Physics and Astronomy

Faculty of Medicine:

Mike Marin, Instructor, School of Population and Public Health

Faculty of Arts:

Leslie Burkholder, Senior Instructor, Philosophy
Diana Whistler, Research Associate / Sessional Lecturer, Economics
Fred Cutler, Associate Professor, Political Science
Andrew Owen, Assistant Professor, Political Science

Year 1: Summary

Introductory statistics is taught in departments across UBC. Typically, instructional resources and expertise are not shared across units resulting in duplication of efforts or underuse of valuable material. This project brings together instructors from Science, Arts, and the School of Population & Public Health to develop, adapt, and use instructional resources that address conceptually challenging topics in introductory statistics. The resources will be open, adaptable, consistent in look and feel, and grounded in existing research on learning and statistics. This project will also develop, test and document a model for cross-faculty partnership to support introductory statistics instruction. Finally, it will increase UBC’s faculty-level capacity for identifying, evaluating, adapting and/or developing future statistics learning resources.

Year 1: TLEF ShowcaseYear 1: TLEF Showcase
Year 2: Project YearYear 2
Year 2: Funding Year2016/2017
Year 2: Project TypeLarge TLEF
Year 2: Principal InvestigatorNancy Heckman
Year 2: Funded Amount106,694
Year 2: Team Members

Faculty of Science:

Nancy Heckman, Professor / Head, Statistics
Eugenia Yu, Instructor, Statistics
Bruce Dunham, Senior Instructor, Statistics
Mike Whitlock, Professor, Biology
Doug Bonn, Professor, Physics and Astronomy
Joss Ives, Instructor, Physics and Astronomy

Faculty of Medicine:

Mike Marin, Instructor, School of Population and Public Health

Faculty of Arts:

Leslie Burkholder, Senior Instructor, Philosophy
Diana Whistler, Research Associate / Sessional Lecturer, Economics
Fred Cutler, Associate Professor, Political Science
Andrew Owen, Assistant Professor, Political Science

Year 2: Summary

This project brings together instructors from Science, Arts, and the School of Population & Public Health to develop, adapt, and use instructional resources that address conceptually challenging topics in introductory statistics. The resources will be open, adaptable, consistent in look and feel, and grounded in existing research on learning and statistics. Year 1 of the project focused on building our resource development teams and facilitating cross-team partnerships; identifying key conceptual difficulties and instructional challenges associated with the project’s Topic #1: Sampling Distribution of the Mean; beginning the development of instructional resources and plans for beta testing; and systematically building a tool to support the curation and use of the project’s resources. Year 2 expands resource development, implementation and evaluation, while introducing the STATSpace digital content management system. This project is also developing, testing and will document a model for cross-faculty partnership to support introductory statistics instruction.

Year 2: TLEF ShowcaseYear 2: TLEF Showcase
Project Report2016-TLEF-Final-Report-Heckman-WEB.pdf