Kelly Cline, Carroll College
In this series of assignments, given to a junior
level calculus-based statistics class, we use writing, discussion, and peer
review to teach good use of inferential statistics, the practice of clear
mathematical writing, and to provide an introduction to the process of modern
research.
1. Students must submit a proposal for an
original term project, approximately one page in length. This proposal must explain what question
their study will answer, what population they will be sampling, how they will
gather their sample, and the methods that they will use to analyze their
data. These papers are graded and
suggestions may be offered about how to improve the project.
2. The students are given about half of the
term to complete their project and write it up in a formal paper. They each make a brief illustrated
presentation to the class describing their work.
3. We break the class into groups of about 6
students and each group gives copies of all their papers to another group (i.
e. each member of group A receives a copy of all six papers written by group
B). Now the students are given a few
weeks to write a paper in which they analyze the strengths and weaknesses of
each project and rank them (1-6) so that three are "accepted for
publication" and three are "rejected." Their paper must justify the acceptances/rejections, thus
preventing students from blandly accepting every project, and forcing them to
point out specific weaknesses or flaws in the rejected papers.
4. After assignment 3 has been collected, the students meet with their groups and discuss the papers that they all read, especially focusing on the differences in their rankings. They must work as a committee and create a consensus committee ranking, then fill out a worksheet in which they justify their rankings and offer recommendations to each author as to how their paper could be improved. Because assignment 3 forces the students to form and defend opinions about these papers, the resulting discussion can be very rich, with students probing into the quantitative and conceptual issues quite deeply.
5. Now that they have seriously analyzed the
work done by their peers, in the final weeks of the term students are given the
opportunity to submit a revision of their term paper along with a list
explaining each change that they have made.
Their final score is then an average of both scores on their term paper.