Table 1 - uploaded by Amy Wagler
Content may be subject to copyright.
Types of Student Diversity
Source publication
Resources, strategies, and lessons learned are shared based on the authors' research and experience in teaching statistics (especially introductory statistics) to diverse student populations in varied settings.
Context in source publication
Context 1
... populations can be diverse with respect to many characteristics. From a review of the literature and an invited workshop at a national conference, Lesser (in a paper under review) offers a list of two dozen types of diversity in Table 1 below. As many items as are in this list (almost surely more than what is nontrivially acknowledged by any one book or teacher), we do not claim this list is complete, but simply a good starting point for getting a sense of the many ways in which student populations can be diverse. ...
Citations
... Many traditional approaches for remedial math and statistics education rely on direct instruction approaches that do not align with the GAISE recommendations (Kirschner et al. 2006). Recent work in this area explores ways to support diverse learners using a more constructivist approach to education, however, much of this work is still nascent (Wagler and Lesser 2011;Aridor and Ben-Zvi 2018;Stone, Kay, and Reynolds 2019). This pilot study therefore, aimed to answer the question: Can an intervention that is guided by the GAISE report recommendations and designed to be accessible to students with disabilities lead to an improved understanding of college-level statistics concepts for that population compared to traditional approaches? ...
There have been significant developments in the field of statistics education over the past decade that have improved outcomes for all students. However, there remains relatively little research on the best practices for teaching statistics to students with disabilities. This article describes a conceptual visual approach to teaching a college level general education statistics course aimed at addressing the needs of students with disabilities and other struggling students. The conceptual visual components were employed using the technology tool TinkerPlots. The approach is informed by the recommendations of the GAISE report as well as research on Universal Design and Cognitive Load Theory. With support from the NSF (HRD-1128948), the approach was pilot tested at a college that exclusively serves students with LD, ADHD, and autism to gather preliminary evidence of its effectiveness in teaching statistics concepts to that population. The results of this research and the emergent recommendations to help students with disabilities gain access to statistics are described in this article. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.
... Our surveys and case study interviews also yielded instances of how context may need to be unpacked for someone new to English or the nation's culture. The good news is that there are pedagogical practices and resources that can be readily implemented (a concise list is in Table 2 of Wagler and Lesser, 2011). Our English learner work also spawned papers on other languagerelated topics, including readability Wagler, Lesser, González, and Leal, 2015) and mnemonics (Mocko, Lesser, Wagler, and Francis, 2017), and I've also written on other diversity-related topics (e.g., Lesser, 2010Lesser, , 2014. ...
... There has been less research about racial differences in terms of attitudes toward statistics. As Wagler and Lesser (2011) noted, "Students from diverse cultural or language backgrounds may not always respond in the same way to traditional statistics classroom instruction." But the focus has been largely centered on the impact of language, specifically English as a second language (Ware 2004;Lesser and Winsor 2009). ...
The Survey of Attitudes Toward Statistics or SATS was administered for three consecutive years to students in an Introductory Statistics course at Cornell University. Questions requesting demographic information and expected final course grade were added. Responses were analyzed to investigate possible differences between sexes and racial/ethnic groups. The findings showed that female students had significantly lower average scores than their male counterparts in affect, cognitive competency, and subject difficulty. In addition, they expected lower average final course grades. When expected and achieved grades were compared, both male and female students overestimated their final scores, but female students did so to a lesser extent. No differences in attitudinal scores or grade expectations were found between racial/ethnic groups. However, significant differences between racial groups were found when comparing student's expected and actual grades. Asian students outperformed the other groups in both meeting their personal expectations and achieving significantly higher final grades. Latino and Black students had outcomes well below their expectations. These results suggest that educators should focus on differences between sexes when planning ways to improve students' confidence in their quantitative ability. They should also consider implementing strategies for minority students to achieve their expected final course grade.
A university’s statistics literacy course was redesigned to give its biggest clientele (pre-service elementary and middle school teachers) content and pedagogy to improve their learning and make their future teaching more effective in a geographic region with a significant proportion of English language learners (ELLs) students. The research-informed redesign made the course more accessible and useful and yielded insights about the distinctive ways in which ELL-responsive pedagogy plays out in the statistics classroom, a context that had received little specific attention (compared to the mathematics classroom) despite its rapidly-growing importance in curricular and societal trends.
This paper describes the process used to develop and assess an NSF-funded instructional innovation: an online collection (https://www.CAUSEweb.org/smiles/) of 28 interactive songs of high aesthetic quality designed to span literature-based learning objectives of introductory statistics that develop statistical literacy and reasoning. The interactive songs are also designed to reduce statistics anxiety and require little time or instructor expertise. The songs are interactive in that the interface solicits (and provides hints and feedback on) student contributions (concepts or examples) and then plays back the song with student inputs integrated and highlighted. After providing a brief background, this paper describes requirements, challenges, and opportunities in educational songwriting for the mathematical sciences, then describes the intervention and how its special nature affected the development process. Pilot studies at a research university and at a majority Black two-year college showed that students found the innovation to be a good tool to help their learning, reduce their anxiety about statistics, and had an easy to follow interface and used high quality songs. Analysis of log files from the use of the software shows some evidence of better performance on assessments after use and informs improvements of the automated feedback.
A corpus of current editions of statistics textbooks was assessed to compare aspects and levels of readability for the topics of measures of center, line of fit, regression analysis, and regression inference. Analysis with lexical software of these text selections revealed that the large corpus can be described well by three index variables that summarize the lexical and grammatical complexity of the textbook excerpts. Assessment of those three variables indicates that substantial differences exist in the readability of the topics within textbooks with respect to lexical and grammatical complexity. This analysis suggests that general readability of introductory statistics topics within textbooks varies substantially and it is a recommendation that instructors: (1) be prepared to provide additional support for topics that are more grammatically and lexically complex, and (2) be aware that they can input their instructional materials into LexTutor VP or Coh-metrix as a quick screen for possible readability issues.
