Increasing Student Perceptions of Relevance in Introductory Statistics

English Version

An article by George Cobb (1992) is frequently cited as the beginning of a reform in introductory statistics instruction. The main message of this call is for instructors to minimize their emphasis on calculations and rote memorization of formulas and instead focus on helping students develop an understanding of what statistics are all about. This includes understanding concepts (e.g.,what is a correlation?)and relationships among concepts (e.g., how are correlation and variability related?), but instructors are now also encouraged to help students make connections between these statistical concepts and students’ everyday lives. Iddo Gal and Joan Garfield (1997) argue that balancing “doing statistics [e.g., formulae and mechanics] versus being informed consumers of statistics [e.g., understanding the role of statistics in the world]” (p. 5) in the same course is one of the major challenges facing statistics educators today.

Jessica Utts (2002) also argues that one outcome of learning introductory statistics material should be that the student is a more “educated citizen,” especially given a variety of changes in the “world around us” (p. 1)—chiefly, individuals now have more access to more information more quickly than ever before. With this surge of information, much of it statistical in nature, comes the need for individuals to understand what the information does and does not say. Students must also be able to evaluate the quality of this information and discern “good statistics” from “bad statistics” (Best, 2001; Gal & Garfield, 1997).

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