Chapter 23: Teaching Introductory Statistics: Challenges and Strategies

This chapter examines a variety of curriculum and pedagogy issues related to teaching introductory statistics at the college level (hereafter statistics). Statistics is a challenging class for students due to their lack of background knowledge, common math concepts and procedures they have forgotten since high school, anxiety, and lack of relevance (Conners, McCown, & Roslos-Ewoldsen, 1998). Most students take the class late in their programs, typically because they are required to complete it to graduate.

We believe that statistics does not need to be a stressful experience if taught properly with instructional scaffolding for the “big concepts” and data-analysis procedures. We propose that students face at least four major challenges, including a new technical vocabulary, many new concepts that are not connected adequately across chapters (e.g., different error terms for different inferential procedures), manual calculations, and learning statistical software which can easily stress one’s cognitive limits. Some of these activities, such as manual calculations, may be eliminated from the class and added to optional workshops facilitated by the instructor or a tutor, or incorporated into electronic tutoring systems (MacDougall, 2008). We believe it is better to use instructional strategies that help minimize as many of these four challenges as possible; thus, the first author no longer requires students to perform manual calculations and has made a concerted effort to reduce the cognitive load involved in language to use new software such as SPSS or SAS.