The e-ATLAS (Evaluation and Assessment of Teaching and Learning About Statistics) project is establishing a much needed evidence-based research culture in the statistics education community to better allow it to judge the effectiveness of its past and on-going efforts. Inspired by the Internet's vastly expanded reach, resources, and accelerated development of the statistics education community, the project's innovative design seeks to provide customizable instruments that assess how teachers teach and what students learn. These instruments are administered on-line as part of a globally shared digital library of resources and are linked to databases supporting assessment of course innovations, project evaluation, and research informing materials. Using these instruments, the e-ATLAS project is conducting a randomized nationally representative sampling of college statistics instructors and their classrooms. This provides a baseline of information on college teaching and student learning enabling investigators to triangulate the global position of their work. Through webinars and well-indexed exemplars the e-ATLAS project then supports new investigators in their drive for effective evaluation of their work.
The purpose of the e-ATLAS project was to finalize and field test new surveys to measure how instructors teach introductory statistics at the college level and how well students learn key statistical concepts. The Statistics Teaching Inventory (STI) was customized to survey teachers’ beliefs and pedagogy in four possible teaching scenarios: face-to-face courses, lecture/recitation courses, online courses, and hybrid courses. The Goals and Outcomes Associated with Learning Statistics (GOALS) instrument assesses the statistical reasoning skills of students. These instruments were developed principally by the team led by Professor Joan Garfield at the University of Minnesota with the input of the collaborating project at The Ohio State University. The e-ATLAS project then blazed new trails by conducting a randomized national survey of introductory college statistics instructors using the STI. This survey was supplemented by another survey of instructors who had participated in the professional development programs of the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education. Taken together, the two administrations of the STI tells us how statistics is being taught nationally and how instructor pedagogy and beliefs about teaching differs between those who seek out professional development opportunities and those who do not. Finally, teachers who took part in these STI administrations were asked if their students could be surveyed using GOALS and about 100 instructors agreed to have their students fill out the GOALS assessment. This gives us, for the first time a direct picture of how statistics teaching affects the way that statistics students learn on a national basis (previous work only evaluated the value of individual projects and their pedagogical innovations).
