Updating the Guidelines for
Assessment and Instruction in
Statistics Education (GAISE)
College Report
Michelle Everson, The Ohio State University (everson.50@osu.edu)
Megan Mocko, University of Florida (mmeece@stat.ufl.edu)
Overview
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Introduction/Background
Current structure of the GAISE College Report
What has changed in the last 10 years?
Proposed changes to the GAISE College Report
Timeline for the new report
Discussion
Introduction/Background
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The Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education
(GAISE) were originally endorsed by ASA in 2005. The guidelines included
a K-12 report and a college-level report intended for introductory statistics
courses.
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In 2012, then chair of the Section on Statistical Education, Brad Hartlaub,
assembled a new committee to consider updating the GAISE College
Report.
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The work of the committee led to the writing of an ASA Member Initiative
grant proposal (in 2014) in order to fund a face-to-face meeting to work on
a new report.
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The committee has been working consistently on updating the report for
the past two years, with the goal of having a full draft ready in early 2016.
Committee Members
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Robert Carver, Stonehill College
Michelle Everson (chair), The Ohio State University
John Gabrosek, Grand Valley State University
Ginger Holmes Rowell, Middle Tennessee State University
Nicholas Horton, Amherst College
Robin Lock, St. Lawrence University
Megan Mocko, University of Florida
Allan Rossman, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo
Deborah Rumsey, The Ohio State University
Paul Velleman, Cornell University
Jeffrey Witmer, Oberlin College
Beverly Wood, Indian River State College
Current Structure of the GAISE College Report
• Executive Summary and Introduction
• Goals for Students in an Introductory Course: What it Means to
be Statistically Educated
Current Structure of the GAISE College Report
• Six Recommendations for Teaching the Introductory Statistics Course:
– Emphasize statistical literacy and develop statistical thinking
– Use real data
– Stress conceptual understanding, rather than mere knowledge of
procedures
– Foster active learning in the classroom
– Use technology for developing conceptual understanding and analyzing
data
– Use assessments to improve and evaluate student learning
• Four appendices
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Examples of activities and projects
Examples of assessment items
Example of using technology
Examples of naked, realistic, and real data
Questions
• When you look at the original GAISE College Report, is
there anything missing? If you could add or change
something, what would that be?
What has changed since 2005?
• Technology
• Classroom delivery formats (e.g., online courses, MOOCs, the
flipped classroom)
• Big Data
• Emergence of the Data Science field
• Emphasis on Randomization-based methods
What has changed since 2005?
• Guidelines for how statistics is taught in K-12 settings (i.e., the GAISE
K-12 report) and student-preparation before the college-level course
(Common Core State Standards)
• AP Statistics enrollments: Close to 197,000 students took the AP
Statistics Exam in 2015 (compared to 76,786 in 2005)
• The establishment of the Consortium for the Advancement of
Undergraduate Statistics Education (CAUSE)
• New conferences on teaching statistics (USCOTS and eCOTS), new
assessment resources (e.g., ARTIST) and new assessments (e.g.,
CAOS)
• A new journal: Technology Innovations in Statistics Education
What has changed since 2005?
• Report on Research Priorities in Statistics Education (2012)
• ASA/MAA joint statement on Qualifications for Teaching an Introductory
Statistics Course (2014)
• Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Programs in Statistical
Science (2014)
• Statistical Education of Teachers (SET) report (2015)
• 2015 CUPM Guidelines: Statistics Program Area Study Group Report
What has changed since 2005?
• Enrollments at Two-year colleges
– Elementary Statistics and Probability enrolled 19,000 more students
in 2010 compared to 2005, representing a 16% change.
– Enrollment in mathematics and statistics courses in math programs
at public two-year colleges reached a high of 2,104,751 students in
2010.
– Since 1965, the ratio of statistics to calculus enrollments has
changed from 1:10 to 1:1.
• Enrollments at Four-year colleges
– Enrollments in elementary statistics courses were up 56% in math
departments and 50% in statistics departments from 2005 to 2010.
Source: 2010 Conference Board of Mathematical Sciences (CBMS) Survey Report
Questions
• Can you think of other changes in the field since 2005?
• What has stayed the same since 2005?
Proposed Changes to the GAISE College Report
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We feel strongly that the original six recommendations have stood the test of
time. However, we propose making some minor changes to wording, and we
are debating making bigger changes to Recommendation #1:
1) emphasize statistical literacy and develop statistical thinking*
2) use real data with a context and a purpose
3) focus on conceptual understanding, rather than application of
procedures
4) foster active learning
5) use technology for developing conceptual understanding and for
analyzing data
6) use assessments to improve as well as to evaluate student learning
*Is it clear what is meant by “statistical literacy” and “statistical thinking“? Should we add
definitions? Should we reduce to just “statistical thinking”? Can we get the point across
in a different way altogether?
Proposed Changes to the GAISE College Report
• In the Introduction, we would like to suggest emphasis on two
new areas within the Introductory Statistics course:
– Teach statistics as a science rather than as mathematics
– Provide students with experience with multi-variable thinking
Proposed Changes to the GAISE College Report
• We will maintain a list of goals for the course, but we will reframe
the goals in terms of learning objectives.
– We may summarize the goals in the introduction and share more
detail about the goals within an appendix
– We have talked about some new goals for the course:
• Helping students to become intelligent readers of statisticallybased results
• Discussion of ethics relevant to statistics
• Providing students with opportunities to gain an appreciation of,
and some experience with, the use of computers in statistics
• Gaining knowledge of measurement issues (reliability and
validity)
Proposed Changes to the GAISE College Report
• Because there are many goals for the course, we would like to offer
some suggestions about material that might be omitted from the course
(or reviewed briefly) if time is an issue.
– Basic statistics
• Note that, depending on the background of the students, this
material might be reviewed quickly, just to make sure
terminology and notation are consistent.
– Constructing plots/graphs by hand
– Probability theory
• A focus on definitions, rules, and conditional probability will likely
suffice in the introductory course.
– Advanced training on a computer program
– Drills with different tables
Proposed Changes to the GAISE College Report
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All of the current appendices will be updated, and we will add some appendices
– History of the “Stat 101” course
– Activities and Projects
– Examples of Naked, Realistic, and Real Data
– Examples of Assessment Items
– Examples of Different Delivery Methods (or different settings in which an
introductory statistics course can be taught)
– Examples of Using Technology
• Interactive applets
• Real time response systems
• Statistical software
• Accessing real experimental data online
• Accessing real survey data online
• Using games and other virtual environments.
Questions
• What are your initial thoughts about these proposed
changes?
• Is anything missing? Do you feel certain changes might be
problematic?
Timeline
• We will present our work to date during a panel session at the 2015
Joint Statistical Meetings in Seattle
– “GAISE into the Future: Updating a Landmark Report for an
Increasingly Data-Centric World” will take place at the Joint
Statistics Meetings on Monday, August 10th, from 2 to 3:50 p.m.
• We will continue to work on a draft of the report through the fall, with the
intention of sharing a full draft with the larger community in early 2016
• We hope to have a final draft of the report ready to share with ASA in
the spring of 2016.
Where to go from here?
• Comments/Feedback
– If you have more thoughts or ideas about the status of
our work to date, please share them by going to this
short online survey:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GAISE
• Consider making one (small) change in your course next
semester to keep current with the changing times.
Questions?
• We welcome further questions and discussion about this
work.
• Thank you for joining us today!