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

[bob at statland.org]

Forwarded message:
> From: Nick Carchedi <nick at datacamp.com>
 
> I'll focus on AP Statistics for a moment, since for young people in
> the US, it's often the first (and unfortunately for many, their last)
> encounter with a traditional intro stats curriculum. From talking with
> people closer to the matter than I am, I've gathered that there are
> two primary constraints on the current AP Statistics curriculum:
> 
> 1. Lack of (uniform) access to modern computational tools (e.g. R)
> 2. Lack of sufficient knowledge/training among high school teachers

Yes, but...;-)

I am not sure how much of the "access" issue is reality and how much
is an excuse.  For sure, the teachers and students already have
graphing calculators and are familiar with them, and such calculators
are "expected" on the exam.  In additon, learning R (or any other
software) is not on the syllabus nor the exam.  So I think most
teachers feel no need for R or machines to run it on.  Hence I don't
think they even try to get access.

We got a tiny crack in the wall with the requirement that every AP
teacher submit to an audit to verify that their course matched AP
goals.  One requirement is:

"The school provides access to a computer to aid in investigating and
analyzing data and in exploring statistical models."

Note the use of the singular here -- it sounds like the teacher could
be the only one with "a computer" but 1>0;-)  For now, I think this
might be the place to start -- show teachers how to prepare handouts
or demos with R that illustrate statistical concepts.  There is
already a Teaching Demos package from Greg Snow.

Another pathway comes from the fact that once in a while an AP exam
question includes a computer printout -- essentially always for
regression.  For that reason there is interest in students learning to
read such output (though not necessarily create it).  R could do this,
though R output is pretty idiosyncratic.  It might help to have a
learners package that produces something more like they expect.  (I am
a long time UNIX user and understand the value of output that can be
input to another process but the teachers will want pretty output
instead.)  John Fox's RCommander could help here.  There are also the
very basic help pages I creeated to get a beginner through Stats101
using R as their software:

http://statland.org/Software_Help/R/Rhome.htm

(It does NOT make full use of R.  It was created where most of the
students were using another package but a few wanted to see how to do
the same stuff with R.)  

Another useful resource might be a site hosting RWeb with a library of
demos that can be run online.  Users could tweak the code to fit their
needs -- much easier than starting from scratch, and a good way to
learn how to start from scratch.  It could also intereact directly
with students, who are often much more interested in R than are their
teachers;-)  

I also think lack of interest is the main limitation on teacher
training.  One post in this discussion cited lack of use of ASA
resources and their own volunteer efforts.  I designed an online
course covering the AP syllabus for high school teachers and staffed
it with an outstanding high school teacher highly regarded in the AP
community.  It ran for a while but eventually died for lack of
enrollment.  And our audience was worldwide.  I did summer advanced AP
wrokshops on content that were a week long.  Same deal, cancelled
after three summers due to low enrollment.  Generally the teachers are
not interested in anything they can't see how to IMMEDIATELY put into
use in the classroom.  You have to remember that these folks have
roughly 3 to 4 times the teaching load of college faculty and too
often are just limited to skimming the textbook and trying to
communicate what it says to the students.  It's also my opinion that
getting the students interested is much more important than course
content.

The teachers DO attend the normal AP workshops that cover the program,
the exam, and pedagogy and are very tightly connected to what they
will be doing in class.  

------->  First-time AP Stats. teacher?  Help is on the way! See
http://courses.ncssm.edu/math/Stat_Inst/Stats2007/Bob%20Hayden/Relief.html
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