"Robert J. MacG. Dawson" wrote:
>
> Can anybody out there who is teaching (or has recently taught) a
> stats course at the first year level aimed specifically at non-science
> students send me - either by direct mail or through the group, at your
> discretion - a brief curriculum/course outline ?
>
> What I have in mind is a course intended more to train students to read
> papers that use statistics - at a fairly elementary level, and perhaps
> with some faith in the refereeing process - than to write such papers
> themselves.
>
This can be very easy or very hard, depending on whether the
students as a group are interesting in a particular area of
application. If I were doing it, I would pick a few papers of
common interest--NOT an easy task; I don't know too many
applications to poetry, except for questions of authorship--have the
students read them, and explain how statistical methods are used to
bolster the authors' conclusions.
When my children were in primary school, I was asked to say
something about statistics. I'm mot sure the students got much out
of it.
(The teachers enjoyed it because I pointed out to the students that
unlike when their moms were growing up and discouraged from pursuing
technical careers, the ASA had a Caucus on Women in Statistics--I
showed them a few of the ASA web pages--and that at the annual
meetings there were just as many women as men.)
*I* learned a lot, though. The main take-home message for me was
that students that age didn't care about statistics, but they care a
lot about the fields in which statistics is used. Looking at poets'
interest and motivation in the same light suggests engaging them
through the applications rather than through statistics itself.
I've taught a good deal of nontechnical graduate students over the
past 20 years. While graduate students are not undergraduate poets
or primary school students, it's still clear that they perk up
whenever the methods are being use to study an application they find
interesting, even if the data are artificial.
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