Refereed paper reflections on designing a statistical consulting capstone unit

Abstract

Statistical analysis is required in many different projects throughout most work areas, which makes statistical consulting both exciting and challenging. Most students majoring in statistics do not have real-life experience of statistical consulting, and so it is very important that we as educators prepare our students for the statistical consulting needs of the workforce by offering training in this important area of statistics. We have recently set out to design a final- year undergraduate capstone statistical consulting unit (course) for our students majoring in statistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. This unit brings together the various technical aspects of students’ studies via a problem-based approach to learning about statistical consulting. In this paper, we document our planning of a statistical consulting unit: we discuss the challenges that we faced and indicate our solutions to these challenges during the planning stages of this capstone unit.