I should have noted this at the beginning of the thread rather than now, but forthe record, there is an R special-interest-group mailing list called R-sig-teaching where this might also be of interest.
albyn On Fri, Mar 06, 2009 at 11:28:41AM -0600, Andrew Zieffler wrote: > > Hello Everyone, > > I hope this email finds you all well. I have been asked to write a paper > that discusses some suggested practices based on learning theory and > cognition research for using R in teaching statistics. In thinking about > framing this paper I have been considering all of the instructional > choices that have to be made. For example, should one use the base > graphics, lattice, ggplots, etc? Should there be instructional sessions > just devoted to R or should it be completely integrated and students > introduced to functions and the like as they need it? What additional > supplemental materials should be made available to students to help them > learn R? And there are many more of these types of questions and > decisions that need to be made. > > As I have looked at many of the texts that have incorporated R they all > seem to have a similar approach of introducing simple operators such as > addition, subtraction, etc Then moving to assignment; the idea of > vectors; functions etc. It is unclear to me if there is a reason for > this pattern or if it is based on tradition? Maybe this lends itself to > developing better skills for students who will go on and do more > programming in R, but --- at least in our courses --- there are also a > host of students who will only ever use R as a data analysis tool. > > All of this is a very long-winded way of asking for your help. I would > love to hear your thoughts on the following: > > 1) What are the instructional decisions that a person needs to make if > they are going to be teaching statistics using R? > 2) What decisions have you yourself made and what were your reasons? > 3) How do you teach with R? Do you have sessions on R and other sessions > where content is taught? Is the computing fully integrated with the > content? Or some combination? > 4) If you have the heterogeneous group of students (some going on to > program in R, others just trying to get through, etc.) how do we deal > with this? Do we need to have different types of assignments and > materials for the different students? > > Thank you in advance. > Andy > > > -- > Andrew Zieffler, Ph.D. > Educational Psychology > University of Minnesota > 167 Educational Sciences Building > 56 East River Road > Minneapolis, MN 55455 > Email: [email protected] > http://www.tc.umn.edu/~zief0002 > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Workshop on Integrating Computing into the Statistics Curricula" group. > To post to this group, send email to > [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected] > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/computing-statistics-curricula?hl=en > -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~--- > > _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-teaching
