By Maria Cruciani (Michigan State University)
Information
Inquiry-based activities allow students to explore interesting and applicable questions, motivating deeper engagement in a given task. By integrating authentic data, we place inquiry-based statistical explorations in meaningful contexts, enhancing students’ data literacy and analytical skills. To achieve this aim, we designed three inquiry-based activities that offer students rich experiences exploring questions about US Census Bureau data through R Shiny applets. The activities cover the normal distribution, confidence intervals for proportions, and linear regression, with contexts addressing U.S. rent distributions, access to supplemental nutrition programs, and relationships between income, travel time, and other factors. The three lessons meet introductory statistics learning objectives and foster statistical literacy as students become aware of social phenomena that are modeled in statistics and are situated in a context of societal and personal importance. Students will gain experience leading statistical investigations on a question that interests them and practice communicating their results to others. We will discuss creating and implementing the activities and R Shiny Applets and the importance of situating statistical tasks in real-world contexts with authentic data. These activities have been implemented in introductory statistics courses serving diverse majors at two R1 institutions. Course sections range in size from 30-50 students.