The second half of our intro stats course has limited activities for students to discuss and converse with each other, as the focus is currently on carrying out the procedures of hypothesis tests. Therefore, I decided to create an activity for my classes that I thought would better engage them with the course content.
The activity involved showing the students a video of a debate about whether its okay to call people love or darling (embedded below):
After watching the video in the lecture, I directed students to work in groups to come up with an experimental design to explore this phenomenon. I then asked students to share their designs. One group discussed carrying out an experiment within a supermarket, where half the checkout till operators would be trained to speak more formally to customers, and the other half would be trained to be less formal and use words like love or darling. After customers had been served by these different till operators, they would be asked to complete a quick questionnaire based on their experiences at the till, as they left the store.
Note: A lesson plan which includes this example has been published in Statistics and Data Science Educator.
One of our goals for this project is to increase interactivity between students in large lectures. The students engaged well with the activity, and when asked to share their experiments with the class, many volunteered really interesting and thought provoking ideas. I believe that this activity made a big difference to their understanding of the other experimental designs we reviewed in the course book throughout the rest of the paper.
Rhys is a Professional Teaching Fellow in Statistics and Director of the Science Scholars Programme at the University of Auckland.