Learning Statistics at the Farmers Market? A Comparison of Academic Service Learning and Case Studies in an Introductory Statistics Course

Abstract

We compare the effectiveness of academic service learning to that of case studies in an undergraduate introductory business statistics course. Students in six sections of the course were assigned either an academic service learning project (ASL) or business case studies (CS). We examine two learning outcomes: students' performance on the final exam and their perceptions of the relevance of statistics for their professional development. We find no statistically significant difference between ASL and CS students with regard to final examination performance, but students who participated in the ASL project as opposed to CS were less likely to agree that “[they] will have no application for statistics in [their] profession[s].” The estimated relationship is both large and statistically significant (p < 0.01).