Environmental AIMS (Applied Investigations in Mathematics & Statistics)

环境- aims项目利用年轻人对阿巴拉契亚地区环境现象的天然好奇心，提高他们在统计学入门课程中的表现和成功，并改善他们对数学和统计学的总体态度。该项目由一个研究过阿巴拉契亚地区水质问题的环境科学家和一个来自阿巴拉契亚地区的统计学家组成的合作团队，利用环境研究所从肯塔基州阿巴拉契亚地区收集的当地和区域水质和生物数据，提供基于探究的实验室。该项目正在为统计学入门课程建立一个以探究为基础的小组授课的环境-AIMS实验室，并正在建立一个多学科教员的专业团体，以便为课程发展过程提供信息，并促进跨校园和其他机构的传播。该项目旨在通过评估学生在核心内容和通识教育学习目标上的表现改善，以及学生对统计和数学态度的改善，来探索以团队教学为中心、以探究为基础的统计实验课程是否是一种有效的方法。这种方法具有变革性，因为跨学科合作不是针对特定的专业群体，而是为了展示统计推理的广泛适用性。该项目鼓励来自阿巴拉契亚地区历史上社会经济困难地区的年轻人考虑并从事STEM学科的职业，通过提高他们的定量和科学素养，并鼓励他们作为变革的推动者回到家乡社区，从而造福社会。

The Environmental-AIMS program takes advantage of the natural curiosity that young people have about environmental phenomena in the Appalachian region to increase their performance and success in an introductory statistics course and to improve their attitudes towards mathematics and statistics in general. The program uses a collaborative team of an environmental scientist that has studied water quality issues in the Appalachian region and a statistician who is from the Appalachian region to deliver inquiry based laboratories employing local and regional water quality and biological data from the Appalachian Kentucky region collected by the Environmental Research Institute. The project is developing an inquiry-based team-taught Environmental -AIMS laboratory for an introductory statistics course and is establishing a professional community of multidisciplinary faculty to inform the curriculum development process and facilitate dissemination cross campus and to other institutions. The project is exploring whether the team-taught environment-centered, inquiry-based statistics laboratory curriculum is an effective approach by assessing improvement in student performance on core content and general education learning objectives and improvement in student attitudes towards statistics and mathematics. The approach is transformational because the interdisciplinary collaboration is not aimed at a specific group of majors, but rather at demonstrating the broad applicability of statistical reasoning. The program encourages young people from historically socioeconomically distressed region of Appalachia to consider and pursue careers in STEM disciplines and benefits society by raising their quantitative and scientific literacy and by encouraging them to return to their home communities as agents of change.