[R-sig-teaching] Teaching R in high school and college science and math courses

[Stas Kolenikov]

AP Statistics course URL :
http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apstatistics. AP courses will rarely
provide a credit (i.e., the grade that the university will put on
their transcript), but they can be used as a certifying prerequisite
(i.e., you can jump on to the next course in the college sequence if
you demonstrated good performance in the AP class in high school).

Herein lies the catch: a student who may have taken AP Statistics in
high school may not see a statistics class in college whatsoever. That
could be really unfortunate. There is an astonishing number of
approximately 200K high school students taking an AP class this year,
yet we can only convert them to less than 2,000 undergrads coming out
with Bachelor degrees in statistics.

Having my kid going through AP Calculus now as a high school student,
and knowing who is going to teach AP Statistics, I have very mixed
feelings about these courses. The reality is that AP Statistics will
be taught by somebody who, at best, has a degree in math education
(i.e., is a proper math degree dropout), and zero experience (95% CI:
[0,0]) in statistics. As a statistics professional, I advised my son
to skip AP Stat, with the hopes that he would be able to take
statistics from somebody with a degree in it when he goes to college.
The uptake of the American Statistical Association resources for AP
Stat instructors appears to have been dismal; I was not able to
convince the teachers of AP Stat in our local schools to use these
resources, and they instead rely on the pre-canned solutions by the
commercial publishers. Learning R would be truly terrifying for them,
way out of the comfort zone of standardized high school instruction.
The current course materials advocate the use of Minitab and graphing
calculators that high school teachers swear by. What it would take to
have the College Board (the developer of AP Stat tests) to move to the
XXI century and suggest R is beyond me; in some ways, they are bound
to continue relying on calculators as that's the portable non-Internet
technology you can allow on a test, unlike a computer with R installed
on it.

I don't have any solutions, I am just reporting the symptoms. And I am
sure I am just scratching the surface of what many ASA educators have
already been addressing for the past 20 or so years of the AP
Statistics existence.


-- Stas Kolenikov, PhD, PStat (ASA, SSC)
-- Principal Survey Scientist, Abt SRBI
-- Education Officer, Survey Research Methods Section of the American
Statistical Association
-- Opinions stated in this email are mine only, and do not reflect the
position of my employer
-- http://stas.kolenikov.name



On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 5:41 AM, Hadley Wickham <h.wickham at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I agree that R-SIG-Teaching is an appropriate place to keep this
>> topic going.  To us non-Americans, can you explain "AP
>> Statistics" to us and possibly use URLs when you mention
>> websites?
>
> AP = advanced placement. It's an advanced high-school class that
> students can elect to take (typically in their final year) and that
> often counts for university credit (i.e. in many universities a good
> score in an AP class allows you to skip one of the intro level
> classes).
>
> Hadley
>
> --
> http://hadley.nz
>
> _______________________________________________
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