A presentation from the STEM Annual Conference 2014.
Teaching statistics in Psychology is recognized as difficult. We report a novel approach where final year undergraduates teach statistics as a skill to second year undergraduates. The leader-students provide lectures tutorials and laboratory classes over a five week period; learner-students learn the skill of deciding what test to use and how to do it. We have found that this approach succeeds and synergistically brings benefits for both groups of students. Teaching statistics as a skill focuses the effort on doing first and understanding afterwards. We use the analogy of learning to play the trumpet – learn how to do scales and arpeggios and then understand how they fit into music theory. So our approach is to engage learners in repeatedly doing statistics. Each week they focus on one test: they are shown how to do it by a leader-student in a lecture and then do several examples by hand in the lecture guided by a leader-student. Leader-students then offer tutorials and lab-classes where learners work through many more examples until they are achieving 100% correct answers. Standard QA evaluations were employed plus further measures of teaching style. Our discovery is that a strong bond forms between leaders and learners: there is no barrier of status or authority: it is particularly good to be taught by someone who has only recently learned the skill themselves. Because of this both sides mutually inspire each other leading to strong engagement with the method. The learning outcome is high proficiency and more importantly strong confidence. We believe that the principle of this approach could be adopted widely.
