Offering stat 102: social statistics for decision makers

Abstract

Statistical educators should support offering three introductory statistics courses: STAT 100 (Statistical Literacy for non-quantitative majors), STAT 101 (Traditional inferential statistics) and STAT 102 (Social statistics for decision makers). The support for the STAT 102 claim includes the needs of most students taking introductory statistics, the different kinds of decisions being made, the growing importance of big data, the limited amount of free time in the current STAT 101 course, the 2016 update to the GAISE guidelines, the importance of confounding in influencing statistical associations and the ability of confounding to influence statistical significance. This paper provides student-tested ways of showing and explaining confounding, statistical significance and the influence of confounding on statistical significance. Indeed 100% of the IASE respondents agreed that students should be shown how confounding can influence statistical significance, 84% agreed that failure to illustrate this confounder-significance connection constituted "professional negligence" and 69% agreed that statistical educators should support offering STAT 102 along with STAT 100 and STAT 101. In a separate survey of the Augsburg students taking this STAT 102 type course, 61% agreed or strongly agreed that a STAT 102 course should be required by all students for graduation. With most of these statistical educators supporting the existence of a STAT 102 course and most Augsburg students seeing significant value in such a course, the door is now open for a new generation of courses, textbooks and teachers.