This project is using workshops and a distance-learning course to improve the statistical expertise and pedagogical knowledge of instructors of introductory statistics at 2-year colleges. The project is conducting a series of eight traveling workshops, each held in conjunction with a regional meeting of the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges (AMATYC), to disseminate best practices and statistical content knowledge to an audience of instructors who may have limited backgrounds in statistics and limited opportunities for professional development. In addition, the project is conducting a 2-day workshop in conjunction with the 2010 national AMATYC meeting, is offering a distance learning course, and is establishing online discussion groups for instructors of introductory statistics. All of these activities are aimed at 2-year college instructors and are addressing both statistical content and pedagogy following recognized national guidelines. This project is preparing faculty at 2-year colleges to effectively teach introductory statistics by providing access to exemplary resources. The workshops, distance course, and discussion groups are affecting substantial change in the way introductory statistics is taught at 2-year institutions, and are building a stronger community of introductory statistics instructors.
This project created a website, schematyc.stat.ucla.edu, which provides materials and resources to teach a distance course for statistics instructors at two-year colleges. Many such instructors, although highly educated in mathematics, do not have degrees in statistics and might not have any formal training in statistics. This site provides materials for a statistician to offer a distance learning course aimed at teaching both content and pedagogy to two-year college instructors who wish to prepare to teach a modern, data-based statistics course. A course using these materials is scheduled to begin on June 1, 2012. The website is part of a larger project, with the Ohio State University, called Statistical Content Helping to Empower Mathematicians at Two-Year Colleges (SCHEMATYC). The SCHEMATYC project will improve statistical expertise among two-year college faculty. SCHEMATYC will provide a framework on which a solid structure of educational resources and strong working relations between two-year statistics instructors, two-year mathematics departments, and four-year statisticians will be built. Statisticians (members of the Consortium for Undergraduate Statistics Education, CAUSE) have worked closely with two-year college statistics faculty (from the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges, AMATYC)) to develop resources for delivering statistical content to two-year faculty. SCHEMATYC builds on previous NSF-funded projects: CAUSEWAY, which provides pedagogy workshops for undergraduate statistics educators; CAUSEweb, a repository of resources for college statistics educators; DANSER, a collection of statistics assessment tools; and INSPIRE, an on-line distance learning curriculum for AP Statistics teachers. The need for such a program is great because enrollment in introductory statistics courses at two-year colleges, already a sizeable fraction of the introductory statistics population, is growing rapidly and because most two-year instructors do not have a background in modern statistical practice. The introductory statistics course, as defined for example in the Guidelines endorsed by the American Statistical Association (ASA) (GAISE Group, 2005), centers around data analysis and includes many topics that are not part of the educational background of most mathematicians.
