Mere Renovation is Too Little Too Late: We Need to Rethink our Undergraduate Curriculum from the Ground Up

By George W. Cobb. 2015

102 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The last half-dozen years have seen The American Statistician publish well-argued and provocative calls to change our thinking about statistics and how we teach it, among them Brown and Kass, Nolan and Temple-Lang, and Legler et al. Within this past year, the ASA has issued a new and comprehensive set of guidelines for undergraduate programs (ASA, Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Programs in Statistical Science). Accepting (and applauding) all this as background, the current article argues the need to rethink our curriculum from the ground up, and offers five principles and two caveats intended to help us along the path toward a new synthesis. These principles and caveats rest on my sense of three parallel evolutions: the convergence of trends in the roles of mathematics, computation, and context within statistics education. These ongoing changes, together with the articles cited above and the seminal provocation by Leo Breiman call for a deep rethinking of what we teach to undergraduates. In particular, following Brown and Kass, we should put priority on two goals, to make “fundamental concepts accessible” and to “minimize prerequisites to research.” [Received December 2014. Revised July 2015]

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0a21119233ab0e86b3a3afbe0df8b6b9003f5c92

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Citations in the corpus

Statistical Literacy for Active Citizenship: A Call for Data Science Education. (2017, background): “The call for redesigning our statistics curriculum with a focus on multivariate thinking is not new (e.g., Cobb, 2015; GAISE, 2016; Gould et al., 2016; Horton & Hardin, 2015; Ridgway, 2015).”
From the editors: New directions in the reporting of statistical results in the Journal of World Business (2017, methodology): “Yet, despite the longstanding practice of using the p-value as a default decision rule, there has also been an extensive history of criticism surrounding the use of this decision rule (e.g., Edwards, Lindman, & Savage, 1963, Berger & Sellke, 1987; Cobb, 2015; Demidenko, 2016; Meehl, 1978).”
Teaching the Next Generation of Statistics Students to “Think With Data”: Special Issue on Statistics and the Undergraduate Curriculum (2015, background): “This includes a provocative article by George Cobb that is accompanied by an online supplement with 19 responses to the paper from an international group of statisticians (Albert and Glickman 2015; De Veaux and Velleman 2015; Fisher and Bailer 2015; Franklin 2015; Gelman and Loken 2015; Gould 2015; ”