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Making Statistics Attractive to Students

This of course is an age-old problem in Stat. Let’s face it–the very word statistics sounds hopelessly dull. But I would argue that a more modern development is making the problem a lot worse – the Advanced Placement (AP) Statistics courses in high schools.

Professor Xiao-Li Meng has written extensively about the destructive nature of AP Stat. He observed, “Among Harvard undergraduates I asked, the most frequent reason for not considering a statistical major was a ‘turn-off’ experience in an AP statistics course.” That says it all, doesn’t it? And though Meng’s views predictably sparked defensive replies in some quarters, I’ve had exactly the same experiences as Meng in my own interactions with students. No wonder students would rather major in a field like CS and study machine learning–without realizing it is Statistics. It is especially troubling that Statistics may be losing the “best and brightest” students.

One of the major problems is that AP Stat is usually taught by people who lack depth in the subject matter. A typical example is that a student complained to me that his AP Stat teacher could not answer his question as to why it is customary to use n-1 rather than n in the denominator of s^2 , even though he had attended a top-quality high school in the heart of Silicon Valley. But even that lapse is really minor, compared to the lack among the AP teachers of the broad overview typically possessed by Stat professors teaching university courses, in terms of what can be done with Stat, what the philosophy is, what the concepts really mean and so on. AP courses are ostensibly college level, but the students are not getting college-level instruction. The “teach to the test” syndrome that pervades AP courses in general exacerbates this problem.

The most exasperating part of all this is that AP Stat officially relies on TI-83 pocket calculators as its computational vehicle. The machines are expensive, and after all we are living in an age in which R is free! Moreover, the calculators don’t have the capabilities of dazzling graphics and analyzing of nontrivial data sets that R provides – exactly the kinds of things that motivate young people.

So, unlike the “CS usurpation problem,” whose solution is unclear, here is something that actually can be fixed reasonably simply. If I had my druthers, I would simply ban AP Stat, and actually, I am one of those people who would do away with the entire AP program. Obviously, there are too many deeply entrenched interests for this to happen, but one thing that can be done for AP Stat is to switch its computational vehicle to R.

As noted, R is free and is multi platform, with outstanding graphical capabilities. There is no end to the number of data sets teenagers would find attractive for R use, say the Million Song Data Set.

As to a textbook, there are many introductions to Statistics that use R, such as Michael Crawley’s Statistics: An Introduction Using R, and Peter Dalgaard’s Introductory Statistics Using R. But to really do it right, I would suggest that a group of Stat professors collaboratively write an open-source text, as has been done for instance for Chemistry. Examples of interest to high schoolers should be used, say this engaging analysis on OK Cupid.

This is not a complete solution by any means. There still is the issue of AP Stat being taught by people who lack depth in the field, and so on. And even switching to R would meet with resistance from various interests, such as the College Board and especially the AP Stat teachers themselves.

But given all these weighty problems, it certainly would be nice to do something, right? Switching to R would be doable–and should be done.