Tuesday morning, bright an early at 8:30am, was our session titled “Novel Approaches to First Statistics / Data Science Course”. For some students the first course in statistics may be the only quantitative reasoning course they take in college. For others, it is the first of many in a statistics major curriculum. The content of this course depends on which audience the course is aimed at as well as its place in the curriculum. However a data-centric approach with an emphasis on computation and algorithmic thinking is essential for all modern first statistics courses. The speakers in our session presented their approaches for the various first courses in statistics and data science that they have developed and taught. The discussion also highlighted pedagogical and curricular choices they have made in deciding what to keep, what to eliminate, and what to modify from the traditional introductory statistics curriculum. The speakers in the session were Ben Baumer from Smith College, Rebecca Nugent from CMU, myself, and Daniel Kaplan from Macalester College. Our esteemed discussant was Dick DeVeaux, and our chair, the person who managed to keep this rambunctious bunch on time, was Andrew Bray from Reed College. Here are the slides for each of the speakers. If you have any comments or questions, let us know in the comments, or find us on social media!
Ben Baumer - Three Methods Approach to Statistical Inference
Rebecca Nugent - Lessons Learned in Transitioning from “Intro to Statistics” to “Reasoning with Data”
Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel - A First-Year Undergraduate Data Science Course
Daniel Kaplan - Teaching Stats for Data Science
Dick DeVeaux -** Discussion**
