A New Look to Statistics in the Classroom Professor Laura Shick, Hayden Campbell, and Genevieve Watkins

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Albert Einstein

Service Learning and Critical Thinking: Introductory Statistical Inference  Work with a community partner  Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect  Assistance with analysis of effectiveness of Family Life Skills class  Pre-post measures of participant knowledge of parenting “skills”

Service-Learning  Fosters Civic and Community engagement  Builds students awareness of community issues  Needs, challenges, opportunities for involvement  Allows students to apply classroom learning to real-world issues in the community

Critical Thinking Encourages Students to…..  Challenge their assumptions about an issue  Child Abuse is…….  Analyze a multi-dimensional problem  Synthesize alternative solutions to multi-dimensional challenges and communicate those results

The Community Partner  The organization has been serving since the early 1990’s  Goal is to educate parents on successful parenting practices  Keeping children safe  Keeping families together

Working with the Community Partner  Immediate real-world application with Statistical Analysis  We encountered:  Lack of a representative population size  Ambiguous questionnaire  Statistical significance vs. practical significance  A real problem in our society: Child Abuse  Not just physical abuse (emotional, psychological, verbal)

Results and Conclusions Drawn  Matched-Pair Testing  Showed significant, positive change  Seemed to show improvement, but lacked practicality

The Classroom Experience  Approach to statistics was a success  Brought application to the classroom  Enabled students to gain a real-world perspective on statistics  Great learning opportunity for both client and students