Discussion: But How Do You Teach It?

Abstract

esgential. to. understanding report& in. the news-n medical. eperiment e Student-need. to. understand. the different interpretations of probabilities (subjective and objective) and risk (relative and absolute). Gal would like students to come away from a statistical literacy course with an ability to read a news article and almost automatically ask a set of questions such as: Where did the data come from? What kind of a study is it? Was the statistical analysis appropriate for the data? It is natural to ask what kind of a course would best achieve these goals? We had Gal's goals in mind when we developed a course called at Dartmouth College. This course was developed with help from colleagues at other colleges and has been taught in a number of different ways. Here is how it is taught at Dartmouth. For a typical class we choose a recent newspaper article that uses probability and statistical concepts. We ask the students, in groups of three or four, to read the article and answer two or three questions relating to it. Then, as a class, we discuss the statistical issues involved in the study. More information about the course is available at the web site (1). Another approach has been to add current chance news discussions to a more standard introductory statistics course, referred to as a Chance-enhanced To assist others in teaching a course, we established a monthly electronic newsletter Chance News that discusses current issues in the news and provides discussion questions. In addition we have had Lecture series where we invited statisticians and other researchers who work in areas reported frequently in the news to give background talks for students and teachers. For example, Arnold Barnett from MIT talked about measuring the risk of flying. Susan Ellenberg from the Federal Drug Association talked about regulation of medical products, and Hal Stern from Iowa University talked about statistics in sports. These videos and other information related to the course are available on the web site (1) and should be useful in any statistical literacy course. Books that have been used in teaching a course would be appropriate for statistical literacy courses include Statistics by Freedman, Pisanni, and Purvis, Jessica Utts' Seeing Through Statistics, and David Moore's Statistics: Concepts and Controversies. But how do we reach the general public? Gal is interested in a statistical literacy for adults. By the time adults realize they have to understand statistics to make intelligent medical, political, and financial decisions they have long forgotten their elementary statistics course. can we help them? The course was inspired by Magazine (3), now published by the American Statistical Association (ASA). This magazine is published quarterly and has articles and columns related to statistics in everyday life. The ASA is currently working on ways to help Magazine reach the general public. There are several popular books that speak about statistical literacy. classic book is Darrel Huff's How to lie with statistics. John Paulos has written a number of popular books on mathematical literacy. The most relevant to statistical literacy are Numeracy and A Mathematician reads the Newspaper. Paulos also writes a monthly column (4) for ABCnews.com. Another excellent recent