Authentic, Career-Based, Discovery Learning Projects in Introductory Statistics
Project Log
April 2007
Defined key roles; Robb Sinn will act as IRB coordinator, interdisciplinary team coordinator,
pilot site administrator, and workshop coordinator; Dianna Spence will act as primary author of project manual/teacher's guide and
student activity manual, financial/budget manager, project log administrator, and author of project website.
Immediate action items include developing a statistics concept instrument (Robb Sinn to lead) and developing
instruments for student attitudes and confidence/self-efficacy in statistics (Dianna Spence to lead).
May 2007
Preliminary planning meeting with Forsyth Central High School; learned that the school no longer uses block scheduling,
which will alter the plan to conduct pilot in Spring of 2008. Because the target content is only covered in the fall,
the pilot will need to be in Fall 2008 instead.
July 2007
Co-PI Andrea Hendricks has shifted to a program in which she will teach exclusively online courses; this will not allow
her to conduct the originally planned pilot classes. She is working on finding a suitable replacement.
August 2007
Todd Hendricks will take Andrea's place on the project. He teaches
at Georgia Perimeter College as well, and he has several years experience
teaching statistics.
The department head has given us full support for
administering our instruments (still being developed) to all students
enrolled in statistics at NGCSU this semester, for the purpose of norming
the instruments. He has advised all instructors of the course (there are
10 sections) of this plan and secured everyone's cooperation in the project.
September 2007
Fewer faculty than we initially expected have expressed interest in participating on the interdisciplinary team;
Robb is soliciting input from department heads to identify good candidates.
As part of the effort to develop a concept instrument, Robb has contacted individuals from the AP Statistics exam as
well as from the Statistics Concept Inventory (SCI). Both entities have been slow to respond. We eventually did receive
a copy of the SCI.
October 2007
A first draft of the concept instrument and the attitude and confidence instruments has been prepared and circulated to
members of the department for critique.
November 2007
The instruments were finalized and delivered to all instructors of statistics with instructions for administering
them before the end of the semester.
The interdisciplinary team members have been identified, and include faculty from Criminal Justice (2), Sociology,
Psychology (2), Business Administration, Nursing, Physical Therapy, Education, and Biology. Robb has communicated with each
of the ten members to coordinate a suitable time for meeting, disseminating project information, and launching
their efforts to develop research constructs and projects suitable for the curriculum materials we will develop.
December 2007
We held our first meeting with the interdisciplinary team. We communicated the goals of the project, explained
expectations for the team members, set a schedule for team member deliverables and subsequent meetings,
and addressed questions from the team.
All instructors administered the instruments to their classes by semester end. Robb and Dianna completed the data
entry for all instrument items of all participants (close to 300 students). The primary reason for this round of
data collection was to norm the instrument; we plan a full analysis with assistance from Frank Pajares.
However, because the methods and materials being developed are based on Robb and Dianna's teaching materials,
Robb and Dianna's 4 sections could be considered a preliminary treatment group against the control group comprised
by the other 6 sections. Simple t-tests confirmed that content knowledge and attitude were both significantly higher
in this preliminary treatment group, which is an encouraging early result.
Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s)
and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).
This page is not a publication of North Georgia College & State University,
and NGCSU has not edited or examined the content.
The author of the page is solely responsible for the content.
