[R-sig-teaching] Teaching R in high school and college science (fwd)

[bob at statland.org]

I often agree with the identification of issues below, and sometimes
with the opinions, but I think there are some factual errors and
omissions.  Details within...



Forwarded message:
> From: Stas Kolenikov <skolenik at gmail.com>
> 
> 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).

I am not sure what this means or if it is meant as a quote from the AP
site, but the usual situation is that students get credit for a
specific course at the college of their choice, and that satisfies any
prerequisites asking for that course.  The one thing they do not get
is a grade.  Or, it's not A, B, C etc., just a pass.    

> 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.

I think we need data to draw a conclusion here.  Some of the kids in
AP Stats. would not have taken stats. in college anyway.  Many take it
anyway because not everyone gets a great score on the AP exam.  Those
students often report the college course is much easier, and they do
well in it.  I know that some kids take more stats. and even major in
stats. as a result of taking the AP course.  I do not have numbers for
any of these but I don't think we should jump to conclusions without
them.

> 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.

Actually the people with math. degrees are the ones who lacked the
people skills to become good teachers;-)  (Disclaimer: I have a BS in
mathematics from MIT.)  Seriously, there are people who WANT to teach
but have no interest in research.  We have little chance of
cooperating with those people if we begin by insulting them.

The target course for AP Statistics is typically taught in a
mathematics department by a mathematician with 1 plus or minus one
course in statistics in their background, i.e., the same
stats. training as the typical AP teacher.  That professor typically
chooses a cookbook textbook and focusses on hand calculations with
toy data (actually, batches of made up numbers).  AP uses quality
textbooks by highly qualified authors.  The exam is written by simialr
people.  I challenge any college stats. instructor to administer an
old AP exam to one of their own classes and compare the results to
those of the AP students.

> 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.

Generally high school math. teachers are EXTEMELY tired of college
folks looking down their noses at them and telling them what to do.
We will have to bend over backwards to avoid that if we want to
influence them.  The master of that skill in my opinion was Dick
Sheaffer, past president of ASA and (IMHO) the father of AP Stats.
AND coauthor of many resources teachers DO use.

That said, I am disappointed at how little interest high school
teachers show in learning content beyond what they have to teach
tomorrow.  This does lead to shallow understanding.  OTOH, I spent
most of my working career in college mathematics departments, and I
find high school teachers MUCH more open to learning more about
content and pedagogy than college mathematicians teaching statistics.    

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 agree with most of this except that the CB does nothing I know of to
promote Minitab and from what I can see in the online AP
Stats. community more folks are using R than Minitab.  Generally the
teachers prefer EDUCATIONAL software over anything used by
professionals.  So StatCrunch is very popular as are online applets,
and a significant number use Fathom.

In my own career I have been in and out of contact with k-12
teachers.  Early on the math. teachers were the ones using and
teaching BASIC.  When I returned years later computers were being used
mainly for business courses and writing term papers and many
math. teachers were quite computer-phobic.  The future teachers in my
stats. classes wanted to do everything on their TI and many resisted
using Minitab.  But not all.

I do not think there is any hope of converting ALL AP teachers to R.
But a significant number are already using it, and those folks are
often leaders in the AP community.  What I think we can do is to make
it as easy as possible for any AP teachers who would LIKE to explore R
to do so.

> 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
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > R-sig-teaching at r-project.org mailing list
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-teaching
> 
> _______________________________________________
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> 
> 


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