I need your thoughts on teaching with R
What do I mean by simplify? ?There are many topics in an introductory statistics course that are ingrained in the curriculum but really are there for the sake of approximation or computational simplification. How many introductory texts still describe how to approximate a "difficult" distribution by a "simpler" distribution (hypergeometric by binomial, binomial by Poisson or Gaussian, etc.)? ?When you can calculate the exact probability why do you want to waste time teaching an approximation and rules like "when np > 5 ..."? ?Even a basic
Even knowing how to look up numbers in a table is an outdated skill!
graphical presentation, the histogram, is outmoded. ?The purpose of the histogram is to give us a picture of the density. ?Why not use a density plot for this? ?There is a great advantage in that you can easily overlay density plots from different groups, not to mention the fact that it shows a smooth approximation to the density. ?In the past we used histograms because it was comparatively simple to choose bins and count the observations in the bins then produce a bar chart. ?We can do better than that now.
I agree 100% with your points apart from this one. I'm not a big fan of density estimates because most real-life distributions are not smooth, continuous and unbounded, like most density estimators assume they are. It's also much harder to understand how a density plot is made, and while I don't think students need to understand the motivations and theory for every tool they use, I think they should understand how their basic graphic tools work. A happy intermediate is the frequency polygon, which has more favourable theoretical properties than the histogram, but is equally easy to understand (and you can overlay them like densities)
I have over the years produced slides for classes based first on Devore's books then on Peter's book and now on the Cohen and Cohen book. ?I am willing to make these available, including the source code, so others can borrow code or presentation approaches if they wish. ?I am not familiar with open documentation licenses like Creative Commons. ?If it would help to stimulate discussion I will make them available without copyright. ?I would be particularly interested in corresponding with potential text book authors on some of the techniques that I think can be used to simplify presentation of R code and graphics. ?I don't have plans to embark on writing a text myself.
I would love to see these! Hadley