Interactive/User-Friendly Gimmicks for Teaching Statistics

Abstract

Statistics is one of the most anxiety-provoking courses that most sociology students are required to take (Blalock 1987; Caine et al. 1978' Fennema and Sherman 1976; Gaydosh 1990; Lundgreen and Fawcett 1980; Richardson and Suinn 1972; Schacht 1990; Schacht and Stewart 1990; Tobias 1978). Although this anxiety is due largely to the fact that most of our students have very limited backgrounds in mathematics (Sells 1978), few sociology departments have the resources to provide the tutoring and remedial work necessary to overcome these students' mathematical shortcomings. Instead, those of us who teach statistics are forced to come up with fixes to reduce our students' anxiety to the point where they can learn basic statistics. In a previous article (Schacht and Stewart 1990) we described one of these quick We found that using humorous examples to illustrate statistical concepts was an effective way to reduce math anxiety in most students. Yet, as any veteran statistics instructor knows, no single teaching technique works for all of our students all of the time. In other words, we need additional types of anxiety reducing fixes. This article describes two interactive, user-friendly gimmicks that we use to reduce our students' anxiety and to increase their understanding of statistical concepts.