[R-sig-teaching] purpose of list

[Graham Smith]

Rob,

>  Is there anything that makes R as easy to use for
> beginners as, say, Minitab?

As a casual observation I am now in my third year of teaching basic
statistics to biology/ecology students with a mix of Minitab and R.
Outside the formal teaching, I have used R with selected students for
6 or 7 years (students who want to work at home, students with
Macs/Linux at home, and my personal dissertation students).

 In the first year I use Minitab and in the second year I use R.
Classes are around 30 students in first year and 20 in second year.

In all three years, unprompted by me, I have had between five and
seven students come to me after the R sessions asking why we hadn't
used R in first year. They find the command line more direct and
immediate than Mintab, which, it seems, they had found confusing. This
year I asked the whole  2nd year class to vote on whether they would
have preferred R to Mintab in 1st year. Everyone voted for R.

This year I also offered R sessions to the first year, in addition to
the Minitab sessions. Six people came to these sessions and all used R
in preference to Mintab for the later marked assignments. They could
have used either program. Again they all said they would rather have
used R for the main teaching sessions.

Next year I am dropping Mintab,and switching to R, but three points.

1. We only have a very limited tme for the stats and only do very
simple things, which are easy in R.
2. The stumbling block in changing to R has not been the students, but
the staff, who don't want to learn a command line stats program, and
are confident the students "won't like it" BUT SPSS license are up for
renewal, staff seemed reassured by my anecdotal evidence for students
liking R and now a days almost everyone seems to know someone in their
field who is using R, or teaching with R. So a switch to R as the
standard looks on the cards.
3. But, we are re-organising and merging with the School of Social
Sciences who I understand are super glued to SPSS, so it may be
interesting to see what happens.

Graham

BTW I do introduce Rcmdr and BiodiversityR to the students so they
know there are GUI alternatives if they get stuck, and some do use
these, but most seem to simply email me the code to sort out where
they have gone wrong.