Page 53 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 3

STS515 Alison L. G. et al.
disciplines. We believe this fact should be reflected in the way we teach
Statistics. We should prepare and encourage our students to engage in
interactions, by cultivating, among other things, their collaboration and
communication skills.
We believe that, collectively, these three traits and attitudes comprise an
adaptive statistical mindset, i.e. a disposition and way of thinking that is
essential for the independent and continued development of learners and
practitioners in the field. These proposed traits and attitudes parallel the entire
statistical process, from planning, to analysis, to result dissemination. The call
for statistical thinking is well-documented and goes back to at least Cobb
(1992). The other two characteristics are complementary to the statistical
process, in that they incite and advance its development. All three include
higher-order thinking skills which, although difficult to teach, should
nevertheless be integrated and cultivated throughout the curriculum. In the
next section, we present our approach for doing so in the context of
introductory Data Science courses, showcasing learning activities and
environments that promote such a mindset.

4. Teaching with an Adaptive Statistical Mindset
To illustrate our approach at cultivating an adaptive statistical mindset, we
describe some elements of introductory courses in Data Science at two
campuses of the University of Toronto. Introductory courses in a discipline
can serve many purposes, including acquainting students to its ways of
thinking, attracting them to future study in the discipline, and preparing them
for more advanced work through teaching foundational knowledge. Our
courses are very much in the spirt of Wild’s (2015) call for a “further, faster,
wider” approach to the introductory course, showcasing a wide range of
exciting problems that can be tackled with statistical reasoning.
Table 1 indicates some of the strategies we use in our courses to cultivate
specific components that comprise our proposed adaptive statistical mindset.
In order to start students on a trajectory to developing adaptive expertise, we
have designed our courses to begin the development of innovation and
efficiency in an integrated fashion, while cultivating inquisitiveness, statistical
thinking, and extroversion. Below the table we give some details of
corresponding class activities.

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