[dr.of.chaos@gmail.com: Teaching R in high school and college science and math courses]

User Hayden <bob at statland.org>
    on Tue, 17 May 2016 18:17:50 -0400 writes:

> I applaud your goals and what I can see on Amazon looks
    > good.  In addition to inertia and addiction to graphing
    > calculators, high shcool teachers (I've worked with them
    > in AP Stats. for 20 years or so) are concerned about
    > access and equity.  Students can take the TIs anywhere.
    > There is no guarantee that students will have a suitable
    > computer or Internet access at home.  Many high schools
    > have very limited computer labs but the TIs can be used in
    > a regular classroom.  My counter to all that is that you
    > can run R on computers people are paying the recycling
    > center to haul away.  But there is no organized effort to
    > make use of that resource.  In addition to gathering up
    > the computers, one needs to find spaces to put them in.

    > Years ago I made a scientific version of Puppy Linux that
    > included R and lots of other math. software.  That meant
    > your recycling center computer did not have to have a
    > working/legal OS.  Or even a working hard drive!

    > I posted a link to your book on Amazon in the AP
    > Statistics Community.  There is a small but growing number
    > of R users there.

Dear colleagues,

As an R Core member  (who does a little of volunteering for
school childern - mostly below high-school though)
I've always dreamed of R entering the (upper) high-school level.

I agree that R-SIG-Teaching is an appropriate place to keep this
topic going.  To us non-Americans, can you explain "AP
Statistics" to us and possibly use URLs when you mention
websites?

One remark about TI's:  They are still the thing now, but in
some places, including some here in Switzerland, schools now
start using tablets in the class room. I'm sure that something
close to tablets / smartphones / (their successor)  will be what
future school kids will be using. 

Best regards,

Martin Maechler
ETH Zurich  (and R Core Team)



    > ----- Forwarded message from Brian Dennis
    > <dr.of.chaos at gmail.com> -----

    > Date: Tue, 17 May 2016 14:45:30 -0700 From: Brian Dennis
    > <dr.of.chaos at gmail.com> To: r-sig-teaching at r-project.org
    > Subject: [R-sig-teaching] Teaching R in high school and
    > college science and math courses

    > Hi fellow R-philes,

    > My contention is that R is not just for statistics.
    > Rather, R can be used in math and science classes in
    > colleges, community colleges, and even high schools, to
    > replace most uses of graphing calculators and proprietary
    > spreadsheets.

    > Various aspects of R seem to have immense potential for
    > helping STEM (science, technology, engineering, math)
    > education:

    > (1) With R, scientific calculations and graphs are fun and
    > easy to produce.  A student using R can focus on the
    > scientific and mathematical concepts without having to
    > pore through a manual of daunting calculator keystroke
    > instructions. The students would be analyzing data and
    > depicting equations just as scientists are doing in labs
    > all over the world.

    > (2) R could be learned once and used across a wide variety
    > of STEM courses, promoting the integration of STEM
    > subjects that has been much discussed in principle but
    > elusive in practice.

    > (3) R is now probably the most universally available
    > computational tool (aside from counting on fingers). Many
    > students access a computer to use social media, and most
    > schools and colleges have institutional machines (of
    > varying quality) available to the students. Versions of R
    > exist for most platforms (going back 10 years or more), so
    > R could be made instantly available to every student in
    > every course.

    > (4) R invites collaboration. Students can work in groups
    > to conduct projects in R, build R scripts, and improve
    > each others??? work. Results on a computer screen are
    > easier to view in groups than on a calculator. At home,
    > students can work cooperatively online with R. Every new
    > class can build new accomplishments upon those of previous
    > classes. R builds on itself.

    > (5) R skills follow a student to college and professional
    > life. College statistics and advanced science courses are
    > increasingly teaching R. R skills are a becoming a
    > valuable professional credential in sci-tech, data
    > analytic, and finance firms.

    > (6) R tutorial websites and videos for beginners are now
    > widespread and free.

    > I have taught R as a guest teacher in 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th,
    > and 10th grades (& am a university statistician/scientist
    > by profession).  The kids love it and take to it with
    > gusto.  R seems to them like a real important thing when
    > they produce, all by themselves, beautiful graphs of
    > important concepts.

    > Toward the goal of popularizing R as a general product for
    > scientific graphs and calculations, I wrote a book, "The R
    > Student Companion".  It is an inexpensive paperback
    > modeled in a "lab manual" format.  Naturally, so many free
    > instructional resources are available for R that
    > instructors can bring R into courses without needing extra
    > books.  However, my book is targeted at a high school
    > level audience, having just a little algebra, and it
    > contains real, compelling scientific examples and
    > computational exercises and projects.  The value-added
    > convenience, and the fact that the book ports across many
    > courses, seem to me to make the book a bargain.

    > Publisher website here:
    > https://www.crcpress.com/The-R-Student-Companion/Dennis/p/book/9781439875407

    > Amazon here:
    > http://www.amazon.com/The-Student-Companion-Brian-Dennis/dp/1439875405

    > Read reviews here:
    > http://webpages.uidaho.edu/~brian/reviews_of_RSC.pdf

    > Readin', Rritin', Rithmetic, and R!

    > Enjoy!

    > Brian Dennis Professor of Wildlife and Statistics
    > University of Idaho

    > -- 

    -------> First-time AP Stats. teacher?  Help is on the way!
    -------> See
    > http://courses.ncssm.edu/math/Stat_Inst/Stats2007/Bob%20Hayden/Relief.html
    > _ | | Robert W. Hayden | | 614 Nashua Street #119 / |
    > Milford, New Hampshire 03055 USA
    >    |   |          
    >    | | email: bob@ the site below / x | website:
    > http://statland.org | / ''''''

I agree that R-SIG-Teaching is an appropriate place to keep this
topic going.  To us non-Americans, can you explain "AP
Statistics" to us and possibly use URLs when you mention
websites?

AP = advanced placement. It's an advanced high-school class that
students can elect to take (typically in their final year) and that
often counts for university credit (i.e. in many universities a good
score in an AP class allows you to skip one of the intro level
classes).

Hadley

http://hadley.nz

AP Statistics course URL :
http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apstatistics. AP courses will rarely
provide a credit (i.e., the grade that the university will put on
their transcript), but they can be used as a certifying prerequisite
(i.e., you can jump on to the next course in the college sequence if
you demonstrated good performance in the AP class in high school).

Herein lies the catch: a student who may have taken AP Statistics in
high school may not see a statistics class in college whatsoever. That
could be really unfortunate. There is an astonishing number of
approximately 200K high school students taking an AP class this year,
yet we can only convert them to less than 2,000 undergrads coming out
with Bachelor degrees in statistics.

Having my kid going through AP Calculus now as a high school student,
and knowing who is going to teach AP Statistics, I have very mixed
feelings about these courses. The reality is that AP Statistics will
be taught by somebody who, at best, has a degree in math education
(i.e., is a proper math degree dropout), and zero experience (95% CI:
[0,0]) in statistics. As a statistics professional, I advised my son
to skip AP Stat, with the hopes that he would be able to take
statistics from somebody with a degree in it when he goes to college.
The uptake of the American Statistical Association resources for AP
Stat instructors appears to have been dismal; I was not able to
convince the teachers of AP Stat in our local schools to use these
resources, and they instead rely on the pre-canned solutions by the
commercial publishers. Learning R would be truly terrifying for them,
way out of the comfort zone of standardized high school instruction.
The current course materials advocate the use of Minitab and graphing
calculators that high school teachers swear by. What it would take to
have the College Board (the developer of AP Stat tests) to move to the
XXI century and suggest R is beyond me; in some ways, they are bound
to continue relying on calculators as that's the portable non-Internet
technology you can allow on a test, unlike a computer with R installed
on it.

I don't have any solutions, I am just reporting the symptoms. And I am
sure I am just scratching the surface of what many ASA educators have
already been addressing for the past 20 or so years of the AP
Statistics existence.


-- Stas Kolenikov, PhD, PStat (ASA, SSC)
-- Principal Survey Scientist, Abt SRBI
-- Education Officer, Survey Research Methods Section of the American
Statistical Association
-- Opinions stated in this email are mine only, and do not reflect the
position of my employer
-- http://stas.kolenikov.name

I agree that R-SIG-Teaching is an appropriate place to keep this
topic going.  To us non-Americans, can you explain "AP
Statistics" to us and possibly use URLs when you mention
websites?

AP = advanced placement. It's an advanced high-school class that
students can elect to take (typically in their final year) and that
often counts for university credit (i.e. in many universities a good
score in an AP class allows you to skip one of the intro level
classes).

Hadley

--
http://hadley.nz

_______________________________________________
R-sig-teaching at r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-teaching