Students of Statistics, whether they plan to be statisticians, or only to use statistics as a tool in their professions, often fail to grasp the big ideas of statistics from their courses. "Service" courses concentrate on methods, while "mainstream" courses emphasize mathematical structure, and in both types of course, the powerful concepts most useful in practice are not given much emphasis. The textbooks that guide our teaching style do not seem to include a broad appreciation of statistical ideas among their objectives. Statistics courses that do provide some pedagogic emphasis to the big ideas, may still fail to convey these ideas if the examination does not require their comprehension. In this paper, I give some examples of "big ideas" and exam questions that would assess students' comprehension of them, and argue that even though they are the most important aspects of a course, that they will not be absorbed from courses following currently available textbooks. I suggest the use of a project-based teaching technique with which I have had some experience and success, and how to use traditional textbooks as support for such a project-based course.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education