In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
dennis roberts <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>the problem with herman's pronouncement is mainly ... it is all or nothing
..................
>the main purpose of any intro course is to spark some interest in some
>students ...
>how else would herman propose that we get people interested in statistics?
>they have to start somewhere and sometime
You would probably get many without the prerequisites for
a good chemistry course interested by using a philosophy
based alchemy course, with emphasis on such things as the
philosophers' stone. If you made it appear to be science,
and did not have the simple experiments to show it to be
far off the mark, would they be willing to overthrow it
for the much harder chemistry?
The major mistake in our educational system is to teach
to the moment without the foundations. We have millions
of adults who read poorly because they were taught by the
whole word method, instead of getting the idea that the
alphabet was more than an arbitrary collection of symbols,
which could be used for words arbitrarily.
To understand statistics, not the methodological religion,
one needs probability, including expectation, and algebra,
A student with that can read, for example, all of my
foundational paper starting from consistency, except the
last step, with full understanding. Nobody has come up
with a justification on decision grounds for the techniques
taught in the typical beginning courses, and this does not
mean that it has not been tried. This even applies to them
being approximations.
--
This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907-1399
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558
=================================================================
Instructions for joining and leaving this list and remarks about
the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES are available at
http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/
=================================================================
