The HILT-LAS Project: High Impact, Little Time activities that address Lexical Ambiguity in Statistics

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This project will address the growing national need for improvements in undergraduate statistics education to enable a large cadre of America's residents to acquire a deeper understanding of statistics in order to make informed decisions. A corollary is that statistical literacy is imperative for an educated complex society. Recently, much has been learned about the teaching and learning of undergraduate science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, and one of the recommendations in STEM education is to foster active learning in the classroom. In line with this, education researchers in the STEM disciplines also have long noted that language often poses a barrier for students studying science. With funding from the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program, the project investigators will create and study a collection of research-based activities and corresponding materials for first-year undergraduate statistics courses. These activities and materials will be designed to have high impact on student learning, while requiring little time for an instructor to adopt and implement. These High Impact Little Time (HILT) activities and materials also will focus on breaking down language and jargon barriers in statistics in the process. Following a recommendation from the 2012 National Research Council Report on Discipline-Based Education Research, the project will bring together a multidisciplinary research team of statisticians, discipline-based statistics education researchers, and an expert evaluator with background in assessment and faculty development to guide improvements in learning and instruction in introductory statistics courses. The goals of this project are to: (1) develop a set of research-based HILT activities for addressing issues in student learning of statistics related to language use; (2) generate evidence-based knowledge of the effects these activities have on student learning in statistics; (3) create an interactive professional development instructional model in statistics education that can be widely disseminated; and (4) produce the basis for a web-repository designed not only to disseminate the HILT activities, but also to contain the functionality necessary to promote and sustain the success of the professional development model. The researchers will employ a mixed methods methodology to determine (a) to what extent the implementation of the HILT language activities promote student learning in statistics and (b) the instructional approaches which are effective for developing or improving student learning outcomes in statistics. Quantitative data will be used to determine the extent of differences in student learning, and fhs data will be collected via the administration of the Comprehensive Assessment of Outcomes of a first Statistics Course (CAOS). The project team will also collect qualitative data via the Lexical Ambiguity Instrument (LAI), which will be finalized as part of the project. Data will be collected and analyzed from both students who are exposed to the HILT activities and those who are not.