Modules for Teaching Statistics with Pedagogies using Active Learning (MTStatPAL) provides all-inclusive modules that helps experienced and inexperienced instructors facilitate active learning lessons in teaching introductory college statistics. The active learning lessons include scripts and video segments of experienced instructors completing the activities with students. In this way, the project uses an innovative approach by providing a model of active learning instruction, which assists teachers in anticipating complications that could occur in implementing activity-based lessons.
Each module consists of the following components: (1) An online Pre- or Post-class Activity designed to prepare students for (or supplement) the corresponding in-class activity, which includes a video introduction to the topic, embedded quizzes, and a note-taking template. (2) A package of Instructor Resource Materials that provides a tip sheet with a script for the lesson, a video of the in-class activity facilitated by an experienced statistics teacher, and assessment questions and solutions to evaluate students' conceptual knowledge. (3) An In-class Activity designed to promote student discourse and to help students gain understanding of a statistical concept through an active learning process.
While there is vast literature on the benefits of active learning, there is far less on how to assist instructors, especially inexperienced ones, in effectively implementing active learning lessons. To research the effectiveness of the materials, MTStatPAL employs design experiment methodology (Cobb, diSessa, Lehrer, & Schauble, 2003) to study how the elements of the introductory statistics learning ecology (tasks students solve, kinds of classroom discourse, norms of participation, tools used for learning, and the practical ways the teacher orchestrates relations between these elements) are impacted by the implementation of the MTStatPAL modules the project develops, shifts in student reasoning as a result of completing the MTStatPAL learning modules, as well as, how faculty adapt to teaching with the MTStatPAL learning modules.
At Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU), initial implementation of the modules is taking place in the classrooms of full-time temporary faculty, graduate teaching assistants, and adjunct faculty. A dedicated website allows for the dissemination of the project on a national and international scale. To inform statistics educators of the availability of the active learning modules developed by MTStatPAL, the project team will share results of the project and their project materials at national statistics education events, through national digital libraries (e.g. www.causeweb.org), and through publications.
