Forwarded message: > From: Nick Carchedi <[email protected]> > I'll focus on AP Statistics for a moment, since for young people in > the US, it's often the first (and unfortunately for many, their last) > encounter with a traditional intro stats curriculum. From talking with > people closer to the matter than I am, I've gathered that there are > two primary constraints on the current AP Statistics curriculum: > > 1. Lack of (uniform) access to modern computational tools (e.g. R) > 2. Lack of sufficient knowledge/training among high school teachers
Yes, but...;-) I am not sure how much of the "access" issue is reality and how much is an excuse. For sure, the teachers and students already have graphing calculators and are familiar with them, and such calculators are "expected" on the exam. In additon, learning R (or any other software) is not on the syllabus nor the exam. So I think most teachers feel no need for R or machines to run it on. Hence I don't think they even try to get access. We got a tiny crack in the wall with the requirement that every AP teacher submit to an audit to verify that their course matched AP goals. One requirement is: "The school provides access to a computer to aid in investigating and analyzing data and in exploring statistical models." Note the use of the singular here -- it sounds like the teacher could be the only one with "a computer" but 1>0;-) For now, I think this might be the place to start -- show teachers how to prepare handouts or demos with R that illustrate statistical concepts. There is already a Teaching Demos package from Greg Snow. Another pathway comes from the fact that once in a while an AP exam question includes a computer printout -- essentially always for regression. For that reason there is interest in students learning to read such output (though not necessarily create it). R could do this, though R output is pretty idiosyncratic. It might help to have a learners package that produces something more like they expect. (I am a long time UNIX user and understand the value of output that can be input to another process but the teachers will want pretty output instead.) John Fox's RCommander could help here. There are also the very basic help pages I creeated to get a beginner through Stats101 using R as their software: http://statland.org/Software_Help/R/Rhome.htm (It does NOT make full use of R. It was created where most of the students were using another package but a few wanted to see how to do the same stuff with R.) Another useful resource might be a site hosting RWeb with a library of demos that can be run online. Users could tweak the code to fit their needs -- much easier than starting from scratch, and a good way to learn how to start from scratch. It could also intereact directly with students, who are often much more interested in R than are their teachers;-) I also think lack of interest is the main limitation on teacher training. One post in this discussion cited lack of use of ASA resources and their own volunteer efforts. I designed an online course covering the AP syllabus for high school teachers and staffed it with an outstanding high school teacher highly regarded in the AP community. It ran for a while but eventually died for lack of enrollment. And our audience was worldwide. I did summer advanced AP wrokshops on content that were a week long. Same deal, cancelled after three summers due to low enrollment. Generally the teachers are not interested in anything they can't see how to IMMEDIATELY put into use in the classroom. You have to remember that these folks have roughly 3 to 4 times the teaching load of college faculty and too often are just limited to skimming the textbook and trying to communicate what it says to the students. It's also my opinion that getting the students interested is much more important than course content. The teachers DO attend the normal AP workshops that cover the program, the exam, and pedagogy and are very tightly connected to what they will be doing in class. -------> First-time AP Stats. teacher? Help is on the way! See http://courses.ncssm.edu/math/Stat_Inst/Stats2007/Bob%20Hayden/Relief.html _ | | Robert W. Hayden | | 614 Nashua Street #119 / | Milford, New Hampshire 03055 USA | | | | email: bob@ the site below / x | website: http://statland.org | / '''''' _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-teaching
