Inter-College Study Group to Evaluate
Click Here for Final Committee Report, Completed 10/24/2005
(Microsoft Word file with embedded graphics, 30 pages.)
What is this committee doing?
Consistent with the University’s commitment to “teaching
and the advancement of knowledge,” (from the
TTU mission
statement), this committee will review statistics courses at Texas Tech and
make recommendations aimed at improving the quality of statistics education,
and enhancing the research mission of Texas Tech University. Through its integrative processes, the work
of the committee will directly enable the following outcomes, campus-wide: (i)
a more quantitatively and scientifically literate student body and faculty,
(ii) improved placement of doctoral students, and (iii) improved research
productivity, both in terms of journals and funded projects, for students and
faculty. Here is the specific
charge
to committee (click the hyperlink).
What is the discipline of “Statistics”?
The website of the
American
Statistical Association (ASA) lists a comment from a former ASA president
and two dictionary definitions:
Jon Kettenring, ASA President, 1997, says, "I like
to think of statistics as the science of learning from data...It presents
exciting opportunities for those who work as professional statisticians.
Statistics is essential for the proper running of government, central to
decision making in industry, and a core component of modern educational
curricula at all levels."
American Heritage Dictionary® defines statistics as: "The mathematics of
the collection, organization, and interpretation of numerical data, especially
the analysis of population characteristics by inference from sampling."
The Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary® definition
is: "A branch of mathematics dealing with the collection, analysis,
interpretation, and presentation of masses of numerical data."
How does this committee define a “Statistics Course”?
The committee has adopted the following working
definition of a statistics course:
A “Statistics Course” is any course where more than 50%
is spent covering probability, statistics, or statistical software (SAS, SPSS,
Amos, Lisrel, Minitab, SPLus, R, Stata, Limdep, Eviews, etc.) in a “generic”
way (that is, in a way that requires no discipline-specific prerequisite).
Who is on the Committee?
Ruth Maki,
William Lan, College of Education
Arturo Olivarez, College of Education
William Lan, College of Education
John Kobza,
Alan Reifman, College of Human Sciences
David Wester, College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources
John Borrelli, Dean,
Committee Outputs:
Course listing Spreadsheets (All spreadsheets are preliminary and for only 2003-2004 calendar years)
Database of All Statistics Courses (Last update: 8/20/2005)
Summary of Statistic Courses Coverage (Last update: 8/27/2005)
Enrollment Report 1 Enrollment Report 2 Enrollment Report 3 (Last update: 8/7/2005)
Pie
Chart (Last update: 8/7/2005)
Statistics Links of Interest
The American Statistical Association:
http://www.amstat.org
Links from the
United States Conference on
Teaching Statistics, May 2005:
http://www.causeweb.org/uscots/breakout/
http://www.causeweb.org/uscots/spotlight/curriculum.php
http://www.causeweb.org/uscots/spotlight/pedagogy.php
http://www.causeweb.org/uscots/spotlight/research.php
Assessment tools for Statistical
Literacy: The “ARTIST” Website at
http://www.gen.umn.edu/artist/
The American Statistician Vol. 59(1), February, 2005 published a special section on the training of students who wish to teach statistics.
Wildlife Society Bulletin 2001, Vol. 29, published a special section entitled “Biometrics in Undergraduate Education”
The
Statistics Education Research Journal
http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~iase/publications.php?show=serj#archives
"Rice Virtual Lab in Statistics"
http://onlinestatbook.com/rvls.html
Statistical Thinking for Decision Making (U
of Baltimore)
http://home.ubalt.edu/ntsbarsh/Business-stat/opre504.htm
Statsoft.com Electronic Textbook
http://www.statsoft.com/textbook/stathome.html
Correlations website
http://illuminations.nctm.org/index_d.aspx?id=456
Journal of Statistics Education Data
Archive
http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/jse_data_archive.html
"Hot Hand" in Sports http://thehothand.blogspot.com
Inter-University Consortium for Political
and Social Research (ICPSR, hosted by the