Penn State and Minitab Transform Learning Statistics page 1

Out of the Lecture Hall and into the Lab:

Penn State and Minitab Transform Teaching and Learning Statistics

Minitab Inc. and Penn State University share a long history of innovation. In 1972, three Penn State statistics professors developed Minitab Statistical Software so their introductory students could avoid spending hours doing tedious calculations on electronic calculators and devote more time to exploring statistics concepts directly. The software revolutionized the teaching of introductory statistics and is now the leading package at more than 4,000 colleges and universities worldwide. Now, more than thirty years later, a team of current Penn State statistics faculty has once again transformed the learning experience it offers students, and they've done it using Minitab.

_{The Joab Thomas building for Statistics
on the Penn State University Park campus}

Meeting the Needs of a Large-Enrolled Course

With increasing limits on faculty time and resources, maintaining high quality instruction in large-enrolled courses is a challenge faced by many departments in big universities, and the statistics program at Penn State is no exception. Each semester, nearly one thousand students take Stat 200, an elementary statistics course required for over sixty majors. Until recently, the department divided the course into four sections, and had each class of 240 students meet in a large hall three times per week where instructors would lecture on basic statistical concepts. Although students also met twice per week in smaller groups for review sessions with their teaching assistants, they had little opportunity for interaction with their instructors and no in-class time to apply the concepts they learned. This format was both alienating for students and labor-intensive for instructors, who along with their teaching assistants would spend more than 4,600 hours each semester preparing for, teaching, and administering the course.

To address these concerns, a team that included Professors Bill Harkness, Bob Heckard, and Mosuk Chow, and instructors Laura J. Simon, Patricia Buchanan, and Matt Herbison, came together in 1998 to redesign the course. The team had two goals: first, to more actively engage students in learning statistics by offering them greater hands-on experience doing data collection and analysis; second, to shift the role of instructors and teaching assistants from information presenters to learning facilitators by implementing technology that would reduce the time they needed to prepare, teach, and administer the course.

In collaboration with Penn States Center for Education Technology Services (CETS) and the Schreyer Institute for Innovation in Learning, and with funding from the Pew Foundation, Center for Academic Transformation, the Stat 200 team developed a new course that has both realized these goals and changed the face of elementary statistics instruction at Penn State forever.

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